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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Bryan Caplan wrote a post about India. Suffice to say that India is nothing to be long on, it is a leftist anti upper caste dystopia that hates anyone and everyone who does well. Also it is 1.5 billion people, grouping them together as one is never a good idea.

I never could identify much with the indian identity because i knew for a fact that I have nothing in common with people from Tamil Nadu or Assam. Again, my case is very different because my ancestors were the rulers of this place since the beginning of cilvilisation so we get far more flak. For the curious readers of the motte, I will put up some links to help you understand why living in a democracy is not wonderful at all, especially a bioleninsit one.

You have government schemes where people get paid a million indian rupees to marry into alleged lower castes, what is even better that I cannot criticise any of it due to the sc st act where you get jailed first and the person accusing you gets paid close to a million Indian rupees within a weeks time. What is even better is politicians calling for openly seeing women of higher castes as war brides. I recommend places like desimeta and twitter where you have anon posters to get a real glimpse of what this place actually is like.

Indian on average is not smart nation, it has pockets of really smart people but the average Indian is not smart at all, never was which explains how clustering came about here, so that you could get a pocket of smart people (this is what I have been told, i might be wrong). This is also why most Indians qualify themselves hard. it is more convenient for them to believe that euros are evil stupid people who got lucky and are afraid of smart Indians taking their jobs than it is to believe that people hire Indians because of cheap labour. This is hilariously untrue, and I am not someone who is a self-hating Indian, I have to specify this again and again because I don't see many actually ever posting stuff like this or admitting that there are far far more scams being committed here or how people have genuinely shit diets and hygiene practises. most normies cannot grasp nuance, so if I ever tell people that I am Indian and the stuff wrong with my nation, they would probably think that I am like the average guy, even though the word Indian itself makes little sense given that you have many people here. But if intellectuals in places like Berkeley clump all white and black people together as one, then I cannot blame normies either.

I would say that 20 percent of the Indian expats I know are extremely talented and genuinely good people, yet at the same time India having dirt cheap labor and a culture where people hire their friends in firms that they can get a foothold in is also true. I know how most people migrate and it is usually by means that are hilariously illegal and immoral. I can understand limited migration but mass migration of any capacity is something I find evil, extremely evil. Winning in India means escaping this nation, either physically or through living in bubbles. This nation is doomed, you cannot even vote such problems out since upper castes are a minority. So if you ever see two random strangers interact where they want to get laid, you would see them talk in English for instance since that is one indirect way of communicating status, similarly, your accent and how you dress up or what your tastes are is a good indicator of this stuff.

It is bizarre for me to see people celebrate Halloween and completely forgo traditional festivals. I am 24 and this is happening at a pretty fast pace. So why exactly are people long on a country that has slowed down economically, exports its best people to the west or to fight in its armed forces and is built on extracting every drop of blood from its people, I will never know but I am not one of them neither should you be. Not admitting basic issues like the ones I listed above is the first step to actually fixing things after all.

The bullish case for India is that it’s huge, almost certainly underperforming its potential, and population+location guarantees its going to be an important country for the foreseeable future, with important countries often having a way of attracting investment. It’s also seen economic growth recently. And unlike sub Saharan Africa, it has high-HBD groups living there even if the average is low, so India can come up with enough people to keep the lights on. Plus labor demand elsewhere in the world should benefit India because they’re pretty much perpetually going to be a low bidder.

Indians hbd potential isn't very high at all, there are se smart ones but their number goes down each year since iq is heritable. It's not just ya money thing, Bhutan is not that much better off yet safer and cleaner.

The government will never let any foreign firms make money here, despite cheap labor. They had 70 years, they chose the opposite everytime.

bioleninist

There were opinions polls where India was amongst very few countries where majority answered positively to question if it it's good to use genetic technology to improve future children intelligence...

Do you think it's wrong or irrelevant, or it's just Indians here have bias to answer "yes"?

They don't usually understand it very much tbh. Bioleninism is a word spandrell coined, India fits the bill.

This nation is doomed, you cannot even vote such problems out since upper castes are a minority

Even smarter and more homogeneous nations struggle a lot.

It took 40 years, untold billions of $ and much woe for Swedish nation to start thinking, collectively, maybe we shouldn't be importing refugees on a massive scale.

if I ever tell people that I am Indian and the stuff wrong with my nation, they would probably think that

You could just refuse to identify as Indian and use caste & state or point out that India has the cultural and generic diversity of a continent, which it has. Even a normie should understand that. Ask him if he thinks Finns are the same as Italians perhaps . .

Swedes can deport their problems away, India can't. Sweden is for swedes, India is for the OBCs (legal classification for shudras) and below exclusively.

There will be a civil war if the nation tries to change its founding myth, much like the heritage stock in the US, the cathedral won't want us to have a semblance of our nation back

Even smarter and more homogeneous nations struggle a lot.

It took 40 years, untold billions of $ and much woe for Swedish nation to start thinking, collectively, maybe we shouldn't be importing refugees on a massive scale.

While I'm not going to defend Sweden's migration policy, I think you'd much rather be a victim of your own success (which is where progressivism comes from) than your failures.

It seems that the US gets all the smart Indian immigrants, and the rank and file are inundating Canada and causing dire effects on the quality of life there.

Not by much, Canada's issues are things us and rest of the west will face soon.

I doubt it. Greencard wait time for indians is something like fifty years.

This is so naive as to be scarcely believable. There are at least 11 million illegal immigrants in the US, but the true number is likely much higher. (DHS pegged the number at 11 million in January 2022 for reference).

People from India now fly to Mexico Nicaragua to cross the southern border. And who can blame them? It feels like a great strategy.

There are certainly some number of Indian illegal immigrants but for now it’s a relatively small proportion of the total. This is because overseas Indians often like to visit home and if you’re illegal in the US (especially from Asia rather than just across the border) you can’t ever leave by normal methods like flying out and back in. Easier to go to Canada where visas are plentiful and you can come and go as you please.

There have been 169,000 Indians encountered on the border since 2020 according to one article I found. So you're right it's a small percentage of the overall total. This, of course, does not reflect the number of Indians currently illegal in the US, which could be a lot of things.

In any case, I was reacting to the idea that the number of Indian migrants is constrained by legal migration channels. It is not. It is constrained by border security, of which we've had very little since 2021.

What does that have to do with anything? They're crossing illegally from Canada, and like the rest of the world, they are falsely claiming asylum and dropping anchor babies.

The Chris Kaba verdict is in, and it's exactly what everyone expected.

https://news.sky.com/story/met-police-officer-who-shot-chris-kaba-cleared-of-murder-13234639

The jury reportedly took only 3 hours to decide on the verdict, indicating that it isn't exactly what you'd call a tough case. Meanwhile, the initial CPS prosecution decision iirc took nearly a full 6 months to be cleared to go ahead, indicating that there was immense deliberation on whether it should go ahead at all in the first place.

So why did it go ahead? Well, the answer is probably somewhat obvious. Now, it's normal in the UK for every police firearms discharge to result in an investigation, but to actually go to court on such shaky grounds... I can only imagine that it was to head off "community tensions".

Activists in the UK have been desperate to ape the BLM movement over here, to have their very own moment where they could take to the streets and... do whatever it is they planned on doing. We had copycat protests during 2020, with brave activists shouting "hands up don't shoot" at entirely unarmed average British police officers. This case seems to be what most of them pinned their hopes on as the trigger point; you can see from the article above that those hopes still burn brightly despite this should-be fatal blow.

So, to head off inevitable riots if they didn't prosecute, CPS decided to put an innocent man through the justice system, costing time and taxpayer money on a prosecution that was doomed from the start, in order to try and appease a community that was itching for a reason to get heated and acquire some new Nikes. Truly, to my mind there is no better representation of the utter spinelessness of our leaders and elites in the face of accusations of racism and threats of violent protest than this prosecution.

The influence of US media narratives on crime has been especially distorting outside the US. Total gun deaths and police shootings between the UK and US are almost impossible to compare as the rates are respectively 60x and 150x less common in the UK.

I haven't heard of this case until now, but was there any claimed reason he didn't just get out of the car? Do I have the facts correct: the car and plate number were reported to have been involved in a shooting the day prior, the car was registered to someone other than Kaba, and nothing was found in the car? When pulled over, rammed several cop cars and tried to run the shooter over. Unsurprisingly he had been charged with attempted murder days prior.

The influence of US media narratives on crime has been especially distorting outside the US.

I find this fascinating, the same is happening in my country of Slovakia. My working theory is that we live in de facto what accounts to US Empire. It is not dissimilar to let's say Roman empire or British empire - you have various naturalized people who feel allegiance to the empire, they adopt the imperial customs and ethos and even ape people in imperial centers of power. It also fosters certain strange allegiances, I am sure upper class of Roman Britain or Egypt felt more in common with Roman elites than local people - not unlike what is happening now.

When it comes to culture, there are obvious things such as racism or sexism etc. However what I find interesting is that people here internalize even completely invalid themes - for instance the boomer vs millenial dichotomy from US. In Slovakia, boomers spent their best productive years during communism or very shady early years after the fall of Eastern Bloc in 1989, with 20%+ unemployment and average salary of $100 a month/$1,200 a year - if you were lucky enough to actually have an average job and the employer was actually paying you on time. Boomers at large do not have any financial property such as stocks or bonds to help in their retirement, because these were not accessible. Whatever they had, they probably lost it to double digit inflation, failing state banks and bankrupted post-communist industry. At best they may own some old commie apartment in some small town where they lived their whole lives. They are wholly dependent on state pension, which averages around 60% of average net wage, many of them have to work various odd jobs to survive. And yet young people are parroting the US talking point of how boomers had it so much better than them, how they hoard wealth, how much harder it is now in current economy etc. It is amazing to see.

However what I find interesting is that people here internalize even completely invalid themes - for instance the boomer vs millenial dichotomy from US. In Slovakia the boomers spent their best productive years during communism or very shady early years after the fall of Eastern Bloc in 1989, with 20%+ unemployment and average salary of $100 a month/$1,200 a year - if you were lucky enough to actually have an average job and the employer was actually paying you on time. Boomers at large do not have any financial property such as stocks or bonds to help in their retirement, because these were not accessible.

I made exactly the comparison about Ireland here.

For most of teh Roman Republic stage of the empire, they maintained the fiction that most of the territory controlled by Rome was technically sovereign and merely an "ally".

The US is a good bit less interventionist than we could be, and that's probably for the best, but we should not pretend that just because we haven't annexed Canada that they aren't US territory.

In my (American) opinion, NATO is the empire and America is the primary annexed province.

The MacPherson Report published in 1999 forms the basis of UK law enforcements soft-touch approach to racial minorities and is critical when considering how the UK Met has gotten so soft (till maybe 2022). Every instance of a criminal black being arrested became an example of systemic racism, mandating inquiry and review. Police officers could potentially become racist by osmotic absorption of racist beliefs held by seniors, but the far more likely outcome is their absorption of 'sod this paperwork' effort-to-outcome practices.

The London public which serves the UK civil and political administration decries every instance of white rule enforcement as racism, cries which are eagerly taken up by Good People in London who need to display their moral credentials to the people around them. 'Its their culture' are the blinders automatically applied whenever nonwhites (except for adjacents such as orientals/jews/ibo/sikhs) do anything wrong at all, while 'systemic racism' will be screamed whenever a policeman looks at a brown rapist funny.

The current lefty narrative around the rotherham rapes and all the other muslim gang rapes of children - actual pubescent sub 10-16 year olds, not 'teen' 19 year old 'migrant children' - is that the institutional classism of the police made them dismissive of the claims of rape. In reality the police get attacked as racist for even asking if the muslims are doing anything bad, so why would they bother. Just shut up and let the browns do whatever the fuck they want, thats what the London elite prefer after all.

The police in Rotherham weren’t “institutionally classist” (the police are in any case obviously ‘working class’ under the British class system).

Nevertheless, an extremely disproportionate number (the great majority) of victims in Rotherham, Telford and other grooming gang cases were girls in the care system, children of single mothers, drug addicts and so on. They were the underclass. You can find old articles from the BBC from the early 2000s decrying the scale of “teenage prostitution” in some British towns (that not coincidentally later had ‘grooming gang’ cases) and it is accurate to say that the view of the police in many cases was that they were essentially prostitutes. For most of history most prostitutes started in that trade at a young age and were recruited (by pimps) from the desperate underclass in the same way.

Britain and their restrictive culture around weapons. Next thing you know, they’ll require a license for operating a car.

Something I find interesting is how coverage emphasizes the “outrage” amongst firearms officers. This is the first I’ve heard of it, so I figured it was as manufactured as the charges, but apparently several hundred opted out of carrying their weapons in protest. Not very reassuring. It’s obviously in their interest to secure as many protections against misconduct as they can, and it’s obviously in the public interest to keep them on a tight leash…so long as they offer them respect. At a certain point such an adversarial relationship results in no one wanting the job. I don’t know how to design a process that doesn’t incentive both to claw for more power.

and it’s obviously in the public interest to keep them on a tight leash

In the UK? Hardly. The country has a tiny number of highly vetted, very well trained firearms officers, supporting a mass of unarmed ordinary police. We have one shooting by police marksmen every few years, and it's almost always a guy who is deep in with armed gangs. Armed police are not a threat to the public at all.

'Keeping them on a tight leash' (i.e. taking the side of criminals they interact with) has the second order effect of emboldening those criminals, which is definitely not in the public interest. We see this every few years when some bright spark in the Met decides that stop and search is racist. The police stop using it for a while, the black on black murder rate spikes, and then they quietly go back to using it because it works.

At a certain point such an adversarial relationship results in no one wanting the job

At a certain point such low pay relative to perceived risk results in no one wanting the job. If your paramilitary members (which, make no mistake, is what these particular cops are) have to risk that for every criminal/enemy combatant they kill as part of their job, they're risking sociofinancial execution, it better be paying ludicrous sums. That sum can be social wealth, that can be financial wealth, or they can be a mix (exhibit A: veteran's discount), but they must be paid regardless.

Progressives can never pay them properly because their preferred version of the paramilitary/police are the criminals that the paramilitary is supposed to be shooting, and their core revealed preference is that they just want to force men [and increasingly, the women who work like men] to labor and risk for free (just like Traditionalists reveal preference for free female childbirth and risk) which means they're incapable of fixing that.

I don’t know how to design a process that doesn’t incentive both to claw for more power.

Liberalism was that process, but we are unwilling or unable to afford it any more (which resulted in people being able to claw for more power, and ripped it apart in the process).

Replacing gynosupremacy (current regime) with androsupremacy (ancien regime) is known to fix a security problem in the short term (which is why the Traditionalists feel, correctly, that they can fix this by "retvrning") but at the cost of everything above Security on Maslow's hirerarchy (which stops being a problem when the average man is priced out of everything above it anyway).

So yes, that means that the rough men will use the fact everyone else requires their protection to angle for more power (or must become rough men themselves, which is a victory for the rough men). If the ruling party is unable or unwilling to negotiate they get Battle of Baghdad'd (and the soldiers protesting here is a nano-scale version of that) as the soldiers throw down their tools and cheer for the Taliban... because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.

because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.

I think they probably cared less about power over women and more about power over their abusers. Ending the practice of bacha bazi was a prominent selling point for the Taliban the last two times it took power in Afghanistan. Maybe we should have considered not covering up such practices by our "allies", but ensuring first-world LGBT people aren't smeared as pedophiles is apparently more important than preventing child sexual abuse.

[Refinement: "power over women" -> "power over abusers, most of whom happen to either be women, or are acting womanly".]

I think they probably cared less about power over women and more about power over their abusers.

Interesting that the "right-wing" is slowly rediscovering that this is how they need to couch their messaging (and then refusing to back down when pressed, and Trump will be the model for this going forward). Liberalism is a counterbalance against progressivism just like it was against traditionalism, and the progressives are only liberals in the "continue the revolution against traditionalism" sense, not the "continue the revolution against traditionalists" (which is why they're so occupied with fighting a strawman that no longer exists while becoming indistinguishable from the traditionalist tendencies that were the reason liberals opposed them in the first place).

But what happens when it is mostly women/progressives carrying out the abuse? Well...

but ensuring first-world LGBT people aren't smeared as pedophiles

The "global elite satanist pedophile" people have correctly identified that if you're in power, you get to sexually abuse young men with impunity. The specifics look a little different when women do it but "we will take away your ability to develop the things that make you sexually attractive" (either by raping/molesting you directly, or contributing to the cultural effort to chemically castrate you and give you breasts instead express your inner herbivore man where you hide under your bed in fear of offending a woman) is the general form of what that sexual abuse looks like regardless of whether it's a man or a woman doing either of those things, regardless of whether they think in the moment it's abuse or not (as you know). And the problem is that, because liberal men and women can and will use different functions to compute sexual attraction than normal people, but don't understand that they're doing that, they won't anticipate that their views on what makes the opposite sex attractive (if they even see it that way) is destructive when applied outside of that "orientation"- they can't defend against progressives because they don't know they need to defend against them.

Note that this is specifically forced feminization/passivization [in the traditional straight sex sense, where your psyche is built on men dominate, women submit] (and note that abuse victims tend to become hyper-female as a rationalization/result of the abuse, and that's true for boys as well as girls). Feminization that isn't forced is... something different, but can look the same way under certain circumstances (especially in all-male environments, like boarding schools [Eton is famous for this] and prisons) or if you're not aware/don't care they're distinct (most commonly for religious reasons).

Also, forced masculinization can be accomplished (Stanford Prison Experiment guards, Khmer Rouge putting children in charge of labor camps, royal families), it just isn't done because making more dominant individuals is not generally to the benefit of those with the power so we don't have good data on what happens. [I suspect the Soviet "strong woman, basically a man" meme is a little more than just a meme in this direction, but I don't have data to back that up; I'm also not convinced it's the cause of most FTM transitions as distinct from its standard social contagion effects.]

Maybe we should have considered not covering up such practices by our "allies"

The Westerners that are in power consider the institutional and cultural abuse of boys/young men to have neutral-to-positive moral valence (see above). I think the clearer examples of boy-raping are certainly things that a government would cover up for the same reasons the Church did- that it would allow their legitimacy to be questioned- more than it is an attempt to protect the LGBT movement (who don't really have to care about being called pedophiles as they now possess the social privilege the Church used to have).

because liberal men and women can and will use different functions to compute sexual attraction than normal people

Given the very large number of liberals who exist in modern Western countries, maybe they’re not as “abnormal” as you think they are? Your idea of what constitutes “normal” has to be open to revision in the face of new empirical evidence. Perhaps you need to take seriously the idea that these patterns of behavior were always a latent potential in humanity, rather than an aberration that has been imposed by force from the outside?

I’ve written a lot here before about what a wakeup Covid was for me, regarding facts about human nature - it’s a convenient example to return to. I didn’t want to believe that total mass capitulation to any and all restrictions to stave off a flu was “normal” for most people. But I was forced to admit, through the weight of sheer statistics, that they were the normal ones, and I was the abnormal one.

[Refinement: "power over women" -> "power over abusers, most of whom happen to either be women, or are acting womanly".]

Bacha bazi is machismo-based homosexuality and exists in a very different cultural context to western gayness-based homosexuality. Machismo-based homosexuality is a much more common pattern over time and space (from ancient Athens to US prisons) with varying degrees of consensuality on the part of the boi, but the key point of commonality is that it does not consider buggering a man to be womanly, only allowing yourself to be buggered.

You are trying to map a conflict going on in the post-Christian west to a pre-Abrahamic conflict going on in Afghanistan. Before the spread of Abrahamic religion, machismo-based homosexuality was the default. The Levitical prohibition on men having sex with men (which is reiterated in the New Testament and the Quaran) is very obviously a response to sexual practices that were actually happening (and probably happening licitly - hence the discussions about male temple prostitutes when modern argue about what the prohibition means) around the time and place where it was written. As far as I am aware, it is the first time an authority condemns the man who buggers (rather than the man who allows himself to be buggered) as a sexual deviant.

FWIW, the issues around bacha bazi are one of the many arguments for why Pashtun Afghanistan is so backward that the Taliban is a genuine improvement, and given that the west has lost the social technology to bring societies up from goatfucking to medievalism we should let someone who still has it rule there. The middle-class Kabulites who appear in all the famous "before" photos were probably an artifact of Soviet rule, and mostly managed to bug out anyway. (There also just weren't that many of them)

Bacha bazi is machismo-based homosexuality

You're missing the point slightly, but perhaps I didn't make it clear enough.

In Afghanistan, most of the abusive people are men, and follow male patterns of abuse. Men who are tired of this literally threw their guns down [such an event being the topic of the thread] and let the men who had a better way in.

In the West, most of the abusive people are women, and follow female patterns of abuse. (Most people don't know what they are, especially when the topic is specifically child abuse, so I figured I'd elaborate- "charge the soldier for doing his job because the enemy failed a paper-bag test" is similar abuse along those lines.) Men who are tired of this literally threw their guns down [event topic] and let the negative consequences occur (there are no men who have a better way willing or able to conquer Western countries so this is the best they have).

but the key point of commonality is that it does not consider buggering a man to be womanly, only allowing yourself to be buggered.

That consideration is biologically hardcoded. Forced feminization/passivization subtly breaks down men; doesn't matter if it's an individual man directly buggering you short-term or a group of woman collectively buggering you long-term. (Of course, you have to get to understand 'women can bugger men' first, and most people can't do that for other biologically-hardcoded reasons because never in the history of humanity outside of the last 60 years or so has that ever been possible.)

In the West, most of the abusive people are women

Can you clarify what you mean by this? The overwhelming majority of violent criminals (including rapists) are men. The overwhelming majority of people who participate in violent political unrest (e.g. the CHAZ in Seattle) are men.

When it comes to say, the architects of corporate wokeness, or deep state NWO bureaucrats, there are more women among their ranks, but also still plenty of men.

It seems more likely that we wanted to destroy the Taliban because they harbored Osama Bin Laden after 9/11; cobbled together a messy coalition of liberals, tribal traditionalists, and the plain corrupt; and then looked the other way for the sake of maintaining coalition politics than it is we supported child rape at the behest of domestic LGBT politics.

Yes and no. Not raising a stink about it when we encountered it was "maintaining coalition politics". Classifying the investigation into the practice and the resulting report on it was for domestic politics.

Progressives do not want criminals to turn into the law enforcement mechanism because progressives do not believe crime is real in the first place. Or at least progressives have convinced themselves that crime isnt real, hence the logical next step of abolishing law enforcement.

Self actualization for progressives is contingent on having an oppressive force to actively resist, because their set worldview is already perfect and does not require convincing externals. Said oppressive force must be manifestly engaging in oppression, and so law enforcement against criminal minorities is coopted by progressives to be proof of their worldviews conception. People being criminal assholes isn't because they are shitheads, its because they are systematically oppressed by the big bad state.

In the progressive conception there is never any need for law enforcement labor, and it is impossible for minorities to commit crime when there is no oppressive force incentivizing them to do so. Manifest failures like Christiania, CHAZ, East Hastings, Kensington, etc etc are simply proof of how oppression is so systemic that criminal minorities absorb the culture of white oppressors to oppress themselves.

The labor of law enforcement is false labor for the progressive. It was never needed, and so should never be compensated. Ironically, law enforcement is required for the progressive worldview to continue existing. Without law enforcement, progressives have no manifestation of the oppressive structure and no external force blameable for progressive failures. The progressive worldview requires law enforcement to exist more than it wants it to be abolished, because if law enforcement is gone the progressive ideas have to stand on their own, and deep down all progressives know their pet minorities will find it easier to scalp defenseless dangerhairs than armed magasuburbs.

Everyone loves a nice hot dump on progressives. It's practically the easy-mode for scoring upvotes.

You still need to actually be making an argument or saying something factual and defensible. This post is just pure boo-lighting with a bunch of uncharitable straw men. Do you think any progressive would agree with your characterization of what they believe and what their real motives are? It's one thing to argue that "This is the end result of their policies," it's another to argue "Actually, progressives are all zombie idiots with a worldview that says crime doesn't exist and minorities only ever do bad things because they are oppressed."

If this was a one-off, I'd chide you for weakmanning and ask you to put more effort into your inveighing against progressives in the future. But this isn't a one-off. You have a long, bad history of this sort of post, and being told to stop it.

You actually have a couple of notes to the effect of "last warning, permaban next time." Somehow you skated in the past, and then you went and earned a couple of AAQCs.

You seem to be able to post interesting things when you aren't choking on bile about your outgroup. We would like you to focus on your strengths. By that I do not mean "entertaining rants about how your outgroup is pure stupid evil."

Banned for 2 weeks, and next time will be a permaban.

Since the poster is banned and thus cannot respond, I'll ask the question here: what failures in East Hastings and Kensington is he(?) referring to? What is the significance of these places, wherever they are?

Hastings is a street in Vancouver that at one time (60s-ish) was core shopping district, but for something like 30 years has been a centre for drug addled homelessness, prostitution, open sales of drugs and stolen goods, and assorted crazies. (the major decline was contemporaneous with the shutdown of a large mental hospital, fancy that)

This:

https://preview.redd.it/p1658ejufvp41.jpg?width=640&auto=webp&s=58cb9c9f1e4253daa55db438873c181ec7797b15

vs this:

https://www.vmcdn.ca/f/files/via/import/2019/08/19141502_dtes8-min.jpg;w=960

I assume this is what he's talking about; Kensington is a street in Toronto that used to be kind of... bohemian and funky but has maybe gone the same way? I don't know, I don't care about Toronto at all.

But there are similar areas in all the West Coast Cities -- substitute "Tenderloin" if you are in SF or "Skid Row" in LA. (although I think Skid Row has maybe always been bad? "Skid Row" in Vancouver is now full of gentrified brew-pubs and lofts, IDK)

While I agree with the ban, progressives have frequently openly used this guy's characterization of what they believe as rallying slogans.

I mean, sure, hypocrisy is the only modern sin, being two faced is feature-not-bug, nobody actually believes what they say, etc. but his argument's pretty self-evident. He's saying that the (unspoken: white, neoliberal) progressive's opinions on policing through force can only exist in a gated community or bubble where (non white-collar) crime is non-visible and a fargroup concern.

What am I supposed to take away from this other than that "Defund the police!" people are either lying liars or burying their heads in the sand so hard that they're prospecting for lithium? I have to frequently express to Americans that in most of the rest of the world when people are openly telling them what they believe, their goals and aims, they should actually listen; "river to the sea" is one such recent example. When people say they want sharia law, they really want sharia law.

Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren't paying their rent & are scared to pay their rent & so they go out & they need to feed their child & they don't have money so... they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry - AOC

The idea that crime is fake and that societal factors explain all observable group differences is stock standard progressive thought, actively taught in sociology departments all around the country. I was personally taught this in a university sociology class, and in a criminology class(at the same university).

I am curious, what, other than oppression, would a progressive accept as an explanation for why minorities do bad things? At the population level, at the national level, what other explanation is even compatible with progressive ideas? You could argue culture, but of course a criminal culture is a natural response to an oppressive society. You could argue socio economic factors, but again you are going to very quickly run into the root cause for those difference, oppression. When I brought up the crime-lead theory in my sociology class, my professor countered with, 'and why did certain groups have to live in the areas of high lead concentration?? tut tut tut'. It's oppression all the way down.

Sure, they might not be as frank as the original poster, but the underlying belief structure obviously leads to the same conclusion.

I feel like one of us must be WILDLY failing the ideological Turing test, for you to call this a 'zombie idiot' view.

I feel like one of us must be WILDLY failing the ideological Turing test, for you to call this a 'zombie idiot' view.

It's you. I know lots of progressives. Exactly zero of them believe that literally no minorities would ever commit crimes if not for oppression, or that crime doesn't exist.

I'm not going to debate progressive criminal theory because I don't subscribe to it, but I'm pretty sure even AOC would not say there would be zero crime if the economy were better. If you cannot steelman their perspective in a way they themselves would agree is what they believe (not "this is what your beliefs lead to" but "this is what you literally believe") then you are weak manning, and the OP was being obnoxious about it and has a long history of being obnoxious.

From Emile DeWeaver at the Brennan Center for Justice: "Crime, the Myth":

Crime is not real. This assertion flies in the face of common sense and consensus. Of course crime is real, one would be justified in thinking — we see “crime” every day on the news. Charles Manson was, in fact, responsible for nine murders. Dylann Roof did, in fact, enter the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and kill nine people. Crime rates are, in fact, either up or down or stable on a given day in every city in the United States.

So how could crime be a fiction? The reader and I likely agree that people hurt others and transgress moral boundaries. We may also agree that communities have the job of figuring out how to prevent and remedy such transgressions because a basic precondition for happiness is safety. If, however, we are actually to create a society that is safe for everyone, we’ll profit from challenging our belief in the “reality” of crime.

Begin this challenge by considering race. For hundreds of years, race’s realness was a “fact,” but today, scientists understand that race is not real. What “real” means is well described by journalist Jenée Desmond-Harris. “By ‘real,’ I mean based on facts that people can even begin to agree on. Permanent. Scientific. Objective. Logical. Consistent. Able to stand up to scrutiny.” Racism is real, as real as Dylann Roof. Race, however, is a fiction, and the creation of this fiction was a political project aimed at a political end.

…

The national conversation about crime engages a similar mythology: prevailing narratives routinely deny us the ability to make the distinction between myth and reality. These narratives are, like racial narratives, political projects aimed at political ends. Given the conflation between myth and reality, it makes as much sense to call crime real as it does to call the legend of King Arthur real. If we want to call crime real, we have to locate the truth of what it is and what it isn’t. We have to dispel the mythologies of crime.

One myth is that we punish people for committing crimes. The truth is we punish people less because of what they do and more because of who they are. If I kill a stranger on the street for disobeying my orders, I’m a murderer. Police officers routinely kill unarmed people for, according to police claims, resisting arrest — arrests, as in the case of George Floyd, where no meaningful “crime” has been committed — but we don’t treat police forces like criminal institutions.

…

Then there’s a second myth, that crime is an act committed by an individual. Calling an act a crime is instead a choice we make as a society about how we respond to harms committed in our community. I recently experienced how this myth operates while standing in line at a local Walgreens.

I was about to check out at the cash register when I looked up from my phone and noticed a security guard becoming excited, even agitated. He alternated between whispering to a store clerk and positioning himself to track someone in the surveillance mirrors on the store’s ceiling.

The scene awakened trauma in my body. I remembered all the times I’d been caught shoplifting as a child, how quickly and easily our criminal legal system could destroy a young life, family, and community in the name of justice. I began to scan the security mirrors too, thinking please don’t let this be some kid. The security guard ducked into an aisle. I tracked him in the mirrors to determine his target. The person stealing wasn’t a kid.

…

“Hey, man,” I tried to sound as casually authoritative as I could. “Go back, get whatever you want, and I’ll pay for it.”

Something quite phenomenal happened.

The store’s tense, fearful atmosphere evaporated. A look of deep relief washed over the security guard, and he stepped back without protest. The people standing in line relaxed. A woman working in the photo department left her post to open a third checkout stand specifically to get this homeless man checked out. She smiled and treated him like a human being. It’s true that I had to buy this treatment for him ($30 for toilet paper, food, and a razor), but that did not make the decisions everyone made in that store any less real or less important. All it would have taken is for one person to insist on police involvement, and that homeless man would have been arrested. It took the entire community waiting in that store to save this man.

The homeless man had in one second gone from a criminal whom people feared and even reviled to a member of a community who needed support. Not only did this community — the people in the store — choose to support him, they seemed hungry to do it. They’d just needed to be shown a path and given the opportunity to be the community that the man deserved. The difference between crime and not-crime wasn’t the homeless man’s actions or his intent. It was his community’s response.

It's you. I know lots of progressives. Exactly zero of them believe that literally no minorities would ever commit crimes if not for oppression, or that crime doesn't exist.

I don't think anyone is claiming literally that. It's the difference in criminality between various groups that is 100% ascribed to oppression. Not genes, not culture, only socioeconomic inequity and mental trauma that both stem from oppression are the reason why some groups commit more crimes than others. It's the duty of the privileged groups to compensate oppressed groups by eliminating all trauma triggers and redistributing status and equity in their favor.

I don't think what I've written is a strawman or a weakman of the progressive views on crime.

I guess this needs clarification, but when I said 'at the population level, at the national level' I was trying to preclude the 'literally zero' type objection. I did not assume that a 'most' was all the OP needed to fix their post, since you called it a 'zombie idiot' idea, which suggested a fair deal of distance from a directionally or mostly correct idea (which it seems to be, to me).

I would also really love an answer the question in my post. At the population level, what other cause, that does not reduce down to oppression, is an acceptable progressive explanation for why minorities do bad things? Full disclosure, I honestly don't even know what your answer could be. I literally can't think of one. My understanding is that, 'oppressive society' and 'genetics' covers 100% of the total possible causal factors for the question "why minorities do bad things", with 'oppressive society' containing all of the factors that a progressive would view as acceptable. Again, to me, the view expressed in the OP is stock standard progressive ideation presented in an unfavorable way.

"Directionally correct" is fine. "Expressed in an unfavorable" (meaning uncharitable and inflammatory and weakmanned) way is not. Just saying "Progressives believe all crime is caused by poverty and oppression" would be okay. (Though most progressives don't literally believe there would be zero criminals without poverty and oppression.) But the OP said a lot more than that.

Now you are engaging in a strawman of the other poster. I don’t take the hyperbole to mean that literal progressives believe there are zero criminal assholes. Instead, I think progs genuinely believe that the vast majority of criminals are just good people for whom the systems they are in led them astray. That is, criminals are a fault of society; not a blight on society.

because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.

I'm not convinced that this kind of gender-based class conflict thinking is a feature of rough men. It seems like something spontaneously generated in teenaged girls and gay men, which might explain why cultural marxists are so into female extended adolescence and LBGT. But the Taliban's views on women were not the reason for its popularity among the Afghani army(see: Taliban promises to moderate its treatment of women), Islam was(well that and the incompetence and corruption of the US-backed government).

I think the primary issue was all the buggery and child rape going on amongst the anti-Taliban forces and the new de-Talibanized Afghan Army. The Taliban's founder started his political career hanging child rapists from the gun barrel of a tank, according to legend.

Hadn't heard of the incident until now but per the wikipedia page it looks like a good shoot.

Although,

Members of his family said that he would not have been shot dead if he were not black. Kaba's cousin said: "I've put it out there he wasn't perfect… but regardless of that nobody deserves to be killed by the police unless there is an imminent or direct threat to the public. He dindu nuffin."[13]

My emphasis. So I followed the cite and sure enough this quote doesn't appear on the page at all, let alone the bolded part. Wonder how long that'll stand.

I am impressed you managed to get the version of the page with that quote. It was reverted in less than a minute if I read the history right. Version with it and the reverted version. The whole quote was removed 11 minutes later.

I'm pretty sure every revision is available for every WP article...unless and admin deletes it. I'm not sure how much powers the admins have, but I think it's a lot.

Admins can't delete revision history. Only "oversighters" can do that - this is a rare permission held by 41 people on the English wikipedia, of whom 15 are actively using it. (Compared to 419 active admins).

Given that the addition of "He dindu nuffin." to the Wiki was vandalism - as @TitaniumButterfly points out there is a link to the source for the quote (a BBC interview with a family member), and the line isn't there - the quick reversion is unsurprising. There a lot of editors following changes to high-salience pages in order to revert vandalism quickly.

Sure, but unless one is going through the revision history of the article (which... why?) one would have to have loaded the article during the < 1m period when it was the latest revision to see it as on the main page. The fact the comment I'm replying to wonders how long that will be in the article doesn't sound like they saw it in its already-reverted form.

I legit just found it there and if you care to you'll see that the timestamps work out.

The amount of energy being expended over Trump's recent visit to a McDonald's is kind of interesting to me. It seems to have generated an extraordinary amount of media and online attention. On the supporter side, they are hailing it as a brilliant and deeply meaningful activity, simultaneously trolling Harris and celebrating the dignity of unskilled labor, and generating deeply Americana visuals. On the detractor side, they decry it an illogical and bizarre stunt, that it was fake because the store was not actually open, and compared it to Dukakis in the tank. Some have even doxxed the owner who wrote to the state to complain about labor regulations.

Meanwhile, McDonald's corporate HQ sent what I think is a very good memo to franchisees explaining the value of their goal of political inclusivity and how that manifests as allowing visits from anyone who asks and being proud of being important to American culture.

I think this is interesting because symbolically, it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's food as well as catering a White House dinner with it, widely seen as trashy and disrespectful. The imagery of Trump looking for all the world like a store manager from 3 decades ago I think also triggered some nostalgia - or perhaps post-traumatic stress - about the current state of customer service.

I don't have too much more to say and offer no predictions. It just seemed interesting as one of those things that seemed to trigger something unexpected in people for reasons that go way beyond the substance of the actual event, and figuring out what's resonating with people in either a positive or negative way, and possibly why, seems like a good path towards predicting future trends.

Note how this photo op is in McDonald’s interests. There’s been a huge shift online against “slop” and seed oils, overwhelmingly among young conservatives (one of the weird role reversals in recent years, along with young conservatives criticizing the military and vaccines). Making a big display of Trump serving the slop winds up associating Trump with McDonald’s in a nostalgic, Home Alone cameo kind of way, which improves their image among at at-risk demographic. The Democrats who care so much that they are willing to forego McDonald’s are few and far between, and no one will remember it in a few months anyway. But McDonald’s meanwhile gets a stupid amount of advertising. Whether the spectacle was a farce, insensitive, an homage to Americana, whether Kamala really worked there — McDonald’s is the constant in the controversy.

Trump cooking and serving food at McDonalds, and taking instruction and orders from a teenage manager reminds me greatly of Saturnalia

The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves as it was seen as a time of liberty for both slaves and freedmen alike.

Trump submitted himself to a humbling role reversal. Was it brief? Sure. Was it "staged"? I mean, on a scale from "The grill is off and the meat is raw" to "Actually worked an 8 hour shift", I'd rate it a 2.5? Maybe as high as a 4? I think, like Saturnalia's role reversal, it's symbolically important.

According to some sources, there is (or was, back when conscription was 2 years and dedovschina was more prevalent) a similar role reversal day in some Russian army bases among conscripts, where the "older" conscripts took on the roles of the novice ones. According to the same sources, this role reversal was not very humbling - none of the novices would dare to subject the "granddads" to the same tribulations they were subjected to, because the next day everything would be back to normal.

I don't know if the slaves in Rome were much consoled by Saturnalian symbolic role reversal. Did they have the presence of mind to think "the master will just go back to his usual oppressive self tomorrow"? Perhaps. Could they state it out loud?

If my leaders are going to put on airs of being worldly, I want them to keep the pretense up for more than one day a year.

it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's

I don't think PMC Turbolibs disdain McDonald's because it is lower class, I think they disdain McDonald's because it is so American. A certain kind of urban blue triber hates actually existing American traditions, they hate baseball and football and fast food drive-throughs and Christmas and guns and elections and cars with V8 engines. They hate their own families and communities, they hate where they grew up and those they grew up with, they are sure that whatever somebody else has over there is better than what we have here. How much of this is a still-lingering hatred of the jocks and preps and pretty girls from high school is left as an exercise for the reader. The crossover between self-professed progressives who hate McDonald's and self-professed rightists who hate McDonald's is where you hit horseshoe theory, where the radicals and the reactionaries run into each other, the Hlynka-point.

My wife is American-born, but her parents are immigrants while my family has been in America (and basically in our town) for generations. Sometimes the difference in traditions becomes obvious, and it has made me recognize things that are American for me.

So just after we got married, some eight years ago now, and moved in together for the first time, I mentioned one day before I left for work that I was craving macaroni and cheese, just had a yen for it. My wife, being an excellent wife, went into one of her cookbooks and made an Ina Garten recipe for a five-cheese baked macaroni and cheese, picked up really nice cheeses from Wegmans, and presented me with this delicious dish when I got home. Truly spectacular dinner, it was delicious (if so rich that it was nap inducing), she's since made the same recipe for company several times but...I did have to tell her afterward that when I said I was craving macaroni and cheese, this wasn't really what I was thinking of. I wanted the yellow, boxed, artificial Kraft stuff. My wife was pissed, she still laughs about it, she'd never had boxed mac'n'cheese as a kid, it wasn't something her family would eat, and didn't even really understand what I meant. She thought I was just insulting her cooking, saying it wasn't as good as some processed bullshit.

I'm aware that my wife's five-cheese macaroni and cheese is better, but I still sometimes crave what my mom would pop on the stove when I was a kid. Honestly, even as an adult, I sometimes buy the cartoon-character Kraft boxes, because they're better, I'm not sure if it's just the pasta shapes transporting the cheese better or if the sauce packet is formulated differently. A few days later I got the boxed stuff and made it, and she understood: this is just a totally different food, and she got why I was craving it a little.

McDonald's and Wendy's and Burger King feel the same nostalgic way to me, but McDonald's is the alpha, the icon. I don't eat a lot of fast food. It's not something I fit into my weekly diet. But it still feels nostalgic to me in a deeply Americana way, and every now and then I have a craving for it. The drive through is so American, so ingrained in my mind with memories of the road trip, or hanging out at the mall, or in the car with your friends driving around to nowhere in particular American Graffiti style. Drinking a soda, cruising down the highway, on my way to wherever, it's ingrained in my psyche.

As an aside, I remember growing up a stock stand-up comedy joke, which I literally think I remember hearing from different comedians in Dane Cook/Carlos Mencia/Bill Engvall range, went something like: you know what's so unbelievably stupid? When you see someone at a McDonald's and they order a burger, and fries and then get a diet coke! You think the DIET coke is going to keep you from getting fat?! What a DUMBASS!

And as a ten year old I laughed at the joke, because duh the diet coke didn't make any difference! What an idiot that fat person is ordering a diet coke! For some reason we all despised diet soda, it was a mockable concept.

Now, as an adult, that's exactly my ideal drive-through fast food order on that road trip. Cheeseburger, small fries just for a taste, small chicken nuggets, large diet coke. (My actual order tends to be determined by coupons and online offers) A mcdouble is 390 calories and 22g of protein, not that bad occasionally on an IIFYM scale though I wouldn't recommend living off them. A small fry isn't great but it's only 230 calories. The McNuggets are even decent: 190 calories and 9g of protein. Eliminating the sugar and empty calories from the soda is the [single best way] to improve the nutrition of an occasional fast-food indulgence! I get all my nostalgia buttons pressed for the fast food I ate as a kid, and the final result is something like 800 calories and 35g of protein, too much in the way of salt and fat and whatever bad stuff, but not going to ruin my week or anything.

I have a stash of cheap spicy ramen noodles in my house that I get a craving for once a few months. I personally blame this on my experiences in university where after training in the evening the hot cup of noodles just kept me going and now this flavor is stamped on my soul forever.

Diet Coke is also just a completely different drink. It tastes different, even than Coke Zero.

I used to have a lot of Diet Coke in my house as a kid, and the taste is something I can recall quite distinctly.

Diet Coke was sort of the first attempt at producing a zero-calorie alternative to Coke, and years later with better technology they found they could produce something closer to regular Coke, but by then Diet Coke had its own loyal customer base that would be dangerous to offend. In my own household, my wife loves Diet Coke, while I prefer Coke Zero.

It's interesting how the original goal was to make fake Coke, but then releasing a new product that was closer to real Coke didn't entirely supplant the original fake, because the original fake now had its own specific reputation and flavor.

Diet Coke was sort of the first attempt at producing a zero-calorie alternative to Coke

Second attempt. The first was Tab, which managed to survive until 2020. Coke Zero isn't nearly as superior to Diet Coke than Diet Coke was to Tab, and the 2021 reformulation made it worse IMO.

I'm another that prefers Diet over Zero. "What I thought I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those full-calorie sodas."

Yesterday I was about to post in a topic that it seems to me that the real Trump sin is that he has the audacity of genuinely liking America. And that this just unpalatable to the vobt (vonline blue tribers). Seems you have picked up that sentiment too.

I agree with you, at times, but not at others. Trump loves America, but too often it's an America that he remembers dimly from before he was born. Patriotism is to a large extent loving what your country is, not what you imagine it was or should be.

Trump’s patriotic vision of America is like an idealized version of mid-century NYC. It’s not pastoral or even suburban.

The comparison, elsewhere in this thread, to his Home Alone cameo is relevant.

I think it was just really funny of him. It wasn't some brilliant move, it wasn't a mistake, it was just a small +EV event that's really entertaining to the internet

Meanwhile, McDonald's corporate HQ sent what I think is a very good memo to franchisees explaining the value of their goal of political inclusivity and how that manifests as allowing visits from anyone who asks and being proud of being important to American culture.

This was actually my biggest takeaway.

I had thought that the art of using Corpo-speak to avoid political landmines without being tone-deaf was lost. But somebody managed to produce a memo that carries the subtle implication "We just make food and people give us money for it, don't read anything more into it that that" without taking a side or being dismissive.

I want more of that. Just do what your company is good at. Make money, don't throw jabs along ideological lines or invite political/culture wars in.

As for the stunt itself. The reason Trump 'gets away' with this stuff is he is just that guy. I think with most politicians, we're all aware that they have a mask that they put on to perform when campaigning. That mask drops in private, and they can be nasty people with few redeeming qualities.

Trump doesn't have that Kayfabe. He is himself. If anything, he's just more Trumpy in private (or so leaked audio suggests). So there's a level of earnestness that makes this appearance less of a clearly artificial performance, although it undoubtedly is artificial. Dude actually seems pleased to be out slinging fries, rather than just getting it over with to pull a few extra votes.

For a standard politician to achieve sincerity doing this, they'd have to drop the mask. Which might be a really bad move. Trump just doesn't have a mask.

I think in the West that we're all used to politicians to being carefully managed stage shows that Trump is genuinely an outlier. He's said and done so many ridiculous things that standard retail politics is elevated to a air of authenticity. If a guy is willing to say that Haitians eats pets and illegals have bad genes in public, then saying that he's lying that he likes cooking french fries feels like bit of a stretch.

This was a brilliant publicity stunt by the Trump team, and the unhinged reaction from Redditors proves why.

As I mentioned last week, Republican candidates need to "hack the media" in order to get coverage. This is a great example. Trump comes across really well in this appearance and amplifying it can only help his campaign. If, instead, he gave a speech to talk about entitlement reform or some other boring shit, he would have gotten almost no coverage (and the coverage he did get would be purely negative).

Most elections really do come down to who is the more likeable person. Trump is in his element here and seems like a genuinely nice guy as he hands out bags of greasy food.

The people who are seething that this stunt is fake, on the other hand, come off as really dumb. Trump has been the victim of two assassination attempts. Do you think the Secret Service is going to let randoms through the drive through? Next, they'll tell us that pro wresting is also fake.

And finally there's also the added benefit that Kamala Harris claims to have worked at McDonald's but is probably lying about it.

Of course, most people have already made up their minds. But when the sole plank of the Harris campaign is that Trump is a monster, these humanizing events really undermine the narrative. Trump is now up to 62.5% on Polymarket, the highest since Biden left the race.

My suspicion is that Harris did work ad McDs, but it was in high school in Montreal. Her campaign doesn't really want to draw attention to her childhood outside the US, so they are being evasive.

I dunno if it quite adds up -- not sure what her family income was like once she moved to California, but I know somebody who attended Westmount High with her in Montreal.

This was (and still is) if not the richest postal code in Canada, definitely top 3 -- her parents didn't not own a home because (as her campaign is trying to imply) they couldn't afford to, they didn't own a home because they were rootless university professors and moved around a lot.

This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.

I see no reason to think that she would have had a job at all in this period -- maybe her economic fortunes took a turn for the worse once she moved out, but I kind of doubt this too -- I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?

I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?

A lot of the problem with college loans reflects a growth in school costs, rather than decreasing incomes: see here for breakdowns. Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.

Into the mid-00s, you could still do something comparable with community colleges, but these days they're pretty pricey for a full 2-year degree, and they won't get you to a 4-year.

Though in turn, a lot of the drive against students working is that the sticker-shock prices are only really getting paid by a handful of (often international) students, ameliorated by some amount of federal student aid or in-state discounts. Burnishing your college resume with extracurriculars can be much more renumerative in scholarships than slinging fries, and these programs and school workloads increasingly are incompatible with doing both.

((eg, I'm just a mentor for some FIRST programs, and they end up 25-hour jobs at times.))

Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.

That's about the same as mine in the 90s (more like 4k/a as I recall) -- thing is, McDonalds paid even less than it did now, especially (I would think) in California.

Plenty of people (including me) had part-time (or more often, summer) jobs that were relatively menial and got by without student loans that way -- but these jobs were not pulling $5/hr shifts at McDonalds.

Minimum wage in California seems to have been $3.65 in the 80s -- if one were trying to pay for tuition (and were remotely hireable; ie. a law student) I'd think that one would find a better job?

This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.

"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well. It would have been even more normal when Kamela was a teen in the early 80's. I went to private school and Cambridge, and about half my social circle (myself included) were expected to get paid summer jobs by their parents, and about a third ended up doing menial jobs of the standard student-job variety. (I only know one person who worked at McDs specifically).

"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well.

It was in my circles too -- but the point is that my parents actually upper-middle class rather than literal-communist university professors, and I feel like the attitudes might be somewhat different there?

It definitely still is in Canada. I've mentioned this before here but a major part of the reason the affluent Toronto parents I talk to frequently are swinging against the federal Liberals is because none of their kids can get the typical high school jobs (fast food, grocery store, cashier, waiting tables, etc) that they expect them to get anymore.

I could still ping any of my co-workers at fast food joints and get them to corroborate that I was there, and if I ran from office they would come out of the proverbial woodwork (both good and bad on that front, perhaps). I think the fact they can't find one person who remembers working with her pretty damning.

Snopes tried their best to prove this true and still failed.

Aside from the above-mentioned news reports, there was no tangible evidence of Harris working at McDonald's as a college student. We reached out to Harris' campaign, as well as McDonald's headquarters, seeking tax records or other proof — which could include photos or videos of her working at the restaurant, employment records or physical items such as a uniform or name tag. We also reached out to Harris' sister, Maya, as well as a close friend from Howard University seeking comment, and looked for public interviews by friends or family members of Harris' to confirm the story, with no luck.

I don't think it happened.

To be fair, I would also ignore any media organ asking for comment from me on something long ago. In 2022 one reached out about an old college roommate who was running for office, and I sent the email straight to the trash.

I don't think McDonald's headquarters would respond about a private employment matter, and I'm not even sure it would have employment records from almost half a century ago.

Wouldn't the Harris campaign (who were contacted by Snopes) be highly motivated to provide some evidence for this if it were true? They couldn't find one childhood friend who said 'yeah we worked at Mickey D's together'? This has (at least for the next couple of days until the next cycle) blown up to be front and center in the presidential race.

I agree that the Harris campaign would have more motivation than anyone else. I just think this is assuming malice when incompetence is more than sufficient. Campaigns are extremely crazy internally (it's really hard to convey just how crazy they get unless you've been on one), with unclear lines of responsibility and a giant workload that you'll never get fully through. Even if they have Harris' lifetime tax records on hand (they should if they're available, but they might not be), there's no particular reason to think some intern or junior staffer would have an easy line to pass them on to Snopes. And even if they did, the expected benefit of convincing a Snopes reader that Harris worked at McDonald's might be outweighed by other considerations (giving away unrelated information that could provide avenues of attack, or just in setting a precedent).

Even the IRS doesn't keep more than a decade or so of records on hand ... but apparently the Social Security Administration does? With Form SSA-7050-F4, a $144 request for "Detailed Earnings Information" should provide a record which "Includes periods of employment or self-employment and the names or addresses of employers."

I don't see how the timing would have worked out, though. Harris mentioned working at McDonalds while campaigning in 2019, but I can't find mention of Trump calling this a lie until she brought it up at the end of this August, by which time it would have already been too late for the SSA to provide evidence. ("Please allow SSA 120 days to process", after which point you may call to "leave an inquiry" about why it still hasn't been processed, after which point I guess you just get to enjoy the sloth scene from Zootopia more.)

Have you worked in a big campaign? I think it would be fun and enlightening if you shared your experiences on the thread!

All I know comes from West Wing and I have a feeling that the reality is way more regarded than the typical mass media depiction.

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Fair enough.

The New York Times has now seemed to find a friend that got told second hand by Harris's deceased mother that Harris was working there.

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Nothing's impossible, although she claimed to have worked at McD's in college, not high school.

I'll say with 95% certainty that she made shit up. Even if she didn't have photos or paystubs, the Harris campaign could have at least provided approximate dates and the exact location where she worked. I could easily do that from my own menial jobs 20+ years ago. I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing for politicians and mob bosses to have a bad memory.

Edit: They did provide this info! Though none of her co-workers have come forward, it's a long time ago. On the other hand, it wasn't on her resume from 1987 nor in her memoir. I'm downgrading my probability of "made shit up" to 80%.

In the mean time, Ackman retweeted this funny dunk today:

"51 former intelligence officials say Kamala worked at @McDonalds"

Yeah, 'worked at McDonald's but can't directly confirm it because nobody cares about early fast food jobs so why would I save records of it" is definitely a story I'm willing to believe. I don't know that Canada is necessary for that story, but it would be an added wrinkle if so.

I have a lot of sympathy because I have a pretty similar story. When I was in high school I worked at {local pizza joint} that was sold to new owners and rebranded a couple years after I left. I put it on my first resume and the background check company my first employer used couldn't verify through whatever their normal means are that I worked there. I ended up having to reach out through several layers of friends to get the original owner of the place to write a letter confirming I worked there. It would have been way easier and more convenient to just leave it off. If someone wanted me to prove I worked there again today I'm not sure I could do it. Maybe a dozen people had contemporaneous knowledge and the only ones I'm still in regular contact with are my family.

Maybe social media has kept people more in touch in my generation, but I can reach out to no less than four people that are direct connections on Facebook who I worked with at McDonald’s circa 2002 when I was in high school.

I just played a round of golf with one of them about a month ago.

And I’m not even much of an extrovert, much less a politician.

I think I can find people from about half the shitty menial jobs I worked. Entirely plausible to me that she worked at McDonald’s and doesn’t have any evidence because it was the 80’s.

I don't think that's very typical, at least assuming that you went on to college afterwards. Although all I have as evidence is a gut feeling and my own n=1 case: I worked a fast food job for six months at the beginning of college and could not have been less interested in maintaining connections with any of the people I worked with there.

The status dynamics are interesting. Having worked at McDonald's sometime in the past clearly isn't something that Democrats feel there should be shame over--regardless of the veracity of Kamala's work history, it's still something she thinks gives a boost to her resume. But the response is nevertheless unhinged.

Is it some kind of stolen valor? I'm imagining Trump stocking shelves at CostCo in a photo-op, and I doubt he'd even get any media attention. Or even doing the same exact thing at Burger King: despite being identical slop, the response wouldn't be nearly so vituperative.

It has to do with what McDonald's represents. Kamala worked at McDonald's, but it was something horrific she was forced to do, serving the lowest of the low so she could better herself. If her life is ever dramatized by Netflix, her last day there will depict her departure as she gives a soliloquy about the depravities of mass consumerist slop, corporate wage slavery, car-centric culture, and factory farming. Trump, by contrast, is not only going there voluntarily, but going there as if there were nothing wrong or shameful about going there. Anyone with his privileges doing something so declasse is breaking a code.

I think this alongside the other types of events (football games for example) are things that are coded for the lower classes, the deplorables, the kinds of people that mainline Democrats sneer at while being really patronizing about their attempts to “help”. Republicans are able to appeal to that base because they don’t sneer. They see “dirty jobs” as noble, they see doing a job that needs doing so you can meet your obligations as noble. They see the note rests and sensibilities of the working class in flyover country as worthy and beautiful. And this phot opportunity highlighted the difference between the two parties. The democrats are run by the PMC who see working class whites as beneath them. They don’t want to feel snobby so they tend to give help to minorities. The republicans are the party of doers and builders.

I think your wrong about football coding low status, I mean have you seen how expensive nfl tickets are? Plenty of wealthy high status people enjoy attending them

High-end spectator sport has always been high status. More than half the traditional British social season is spectator sport.

There is a separate issue that specific sports can acquire a lowbrow connotation (like association football in the UK for most of the 20th century) because an alternative is higher-status, but the NFL never fell into that bucket. The Ivy League is primarily an American football league, for crissakes. To a WASPy blueblood, "The Game" is a football game. (Compare the UK, where "The Varsity Match" is a rugby game).

Yeah, this seems to capture a lot of the feels.

Tucker Carlson has characterized this election as the people who talk down to others vs. those who are sick of being talked down to. And while that's obviously reductive, there's a strong element of truth there.

The Democrat says "Come with me and you won't have to go to NASCAR races and eat McDonald's any more. You can be just like me! Wouldn't that be great?". It shows a real lack of understanding about the working class and what they value. They don't do these things because they have to. They like McDonald's!

Trump, despite being raised rich, seems to get it. It's weird. I feel my own common touch fading away with every passing year.

The Democrat says "Come with me and you won't have to go to NASCAR races and eat McDonald's any more. You can be just like me! Wouldn't that be great?". It shows a real lack of understanding about the working class and what they value. They don't do these things because they have to. They like McDonald's!

This reminds me of the narrative I bought into about 20 years ago, when the left was pushing the idea that everyone, including those in the Middle East, just wanted liberal democracy (even if they weren't aware of it). So once freed from the religious oppressive forces keeping them down, they'd gravitate towards such a system like in America. Same for immigrants from such cultures, whose kids would see how awesome liberal democracy is and thus adopt its values. I particularly recall a (more recent, but still like a decade old, I think?) 5-hour long conversation between Cenk Uygher and Sam Harris about this kind of stuff, where Cenk was smugly telling Sam about how suicide bombers and other similar Muslim terrorists could just be won over with the benefits of Western liberal values.

I think the amount of epicycles that have been required to explain the various failures and speedbumps that such a narrative has encountered in the past 2 decades shows that, no, it was rather that the people who pushed such a narrative largely just lacked the ability or willingness to appreciate the true diversity of thought there exists in humans. I don't put much weight to any sort of sociological study anymore, but I suspect that the findings that liberals in America have a hard time modeling how conservatives think in a way that doesn't exist in reverse might be pointing at something that's true. Likewise for the cliche that "liberals think conservatives are evil; conservatives think liberals are stupid."

I honestly think most people simply are not good at understanding the Zeitgeist of cultures outside of their own and perhaps nearby cultures that are fairly similar. We don’t really get the MENA region because most of us are generations removed from a culture that took religion seriously. To most WEIRD people, religion is just a personal preference, probably not much more important than other lifestyle choices. We don’t think of God in universal terms and not really as a thing to order society by. We would never ever suggest a state religion except in a nominalistic way— yes we’re Anglican, but it’s not like we take it seriously enough to seriously teach it or publicly acknowledge it or encourage its practice.

Comparing that to MENA, they’d be convinced that most of the West are atheists. They don’t allow the public display of religion outside of the state sect of Islam. They not only live by those rules themselves, and publicly so, but enforce those rules on everyone whether Muslims or not. The Quran bans homosexual behavior and they will teach gays to fly off skyscrapers. The mindset is that Allah is watching and allah is going to not only keep score but intervene in history and in personal life to enforce his will.

Now on the liberal conservative version, I think it’s the same thing. Liberals are farther along the path to practical atheism. Most have at best found churches that are liberal first and Christian second, if they bother to go. They’re much more down the path of chewing almost everything through the Post-Modern Neo-Marxist lens of oppression and global culture norms of not judging anything except traditional Western values. As such they simply cannot fathom that someone might take such things seriously.

Tucker Carlson has characterized this election as the people who talk down to others vs. those who are sick of being talked down to

And some guy called Shelly Wynter commented to outrage a week ago:

“Let me boil this election down in the African American community to a very simple — I’ll reference the great Malcolm X,” he said. “This race is between house African Americans and field African Americans, and field African Americans are voting for [Donald] Trump.”

Black people certainly do have their own um... interesting versions of everything.

What Donald Trump has over Mitt Romney, J.D. Vance, and Ron DeSantis is that black people seem to genuinely like him. He's got swag. He's the second blackest President in history, trailing Bill Clinton but ahead of Obama.

But there are downsides. My elderly WASP relatives hate him. So disrespectful, so uncouth! Can't win New Hampshire with an attitude like that.

And here I thought being in the party of racism supporters would more easily bring himself to quote that directly.

Of course, his massa(s) will beat his ass if he says it, which implies he himself serves in the house.

There's definitely a stolen valor angle. "Kamala had actually worked there while Trump never had a day of retail work in his life". Do you think upper PMC democrats are the ones posting on Reddit about the entire thing being a sham?

McDonalds is the most well-known public-facing minimum wage job, but I don't doubt there'd be stolen valor vitriol over CostCo too.

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.

McDonalds is the most well-known public-facing minimum wage job, but I don't doubt there'd be stolen valor vitriol over CostCo too.

Costco notoriously pays above market and doesn't hire temporary workers, so it would have to be Walmart.

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.

Dramatically. The Democrats still win the lowest two income quintiles, it's just by a lot less than it used to be.

I haven't seen 'stolen valour' as an angle except from republicans trying to psychoanalyze their opponents. While this might be somewhat more likely to be accurate than the reverse, that's still a low enough bar to clear that it doesn't tell us much. I think most of the chatter is probably just TDS.

I think Reddit is populated mostly by college age children of PMC parents or by failsons who were raised in a PMC family. So while the actual PMC democrats probably aren’t, the people posting on Reddit have been raised in PMC families and have those values. They’re more obnoxious about it mostly because they don’t have the wisdom to hide their PMC power level, or perhaps don’t have to care yet.

There's an angle, definitely. But my visceral response is that people would be much less angry at Trump doing a CostCo photo op than a McDonald's photo op. And, by the same token, there's a reason his campaign decided to do a McDonald's photo op over a CostCo photo op. The role McDonald's plays in the American imagination is key. Or, rather, in the two decidedly different American imaginations: one where it's symbolic of all the worst of American culture, and one where it gives fast convenient yummy oily treats.

There's definitely a stolen valor angle.

I'd be open to the possibility, but no one who's freaking out about it seems to be credibly approaching it from the "stolen valor" angle.

Do you think upper PMC democrats are the ones posting on Reddit about the entire thing being a sham?

I'm sorry what? Do you think /r/antiwork, or the entirety of Reddit for that matter, is in any way representative of a typical McDonald's worker?

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality.

This isn't about The Motte. It's one of those things that has visceral resonance, and the more you push back against it, the more it will look like Trump had a point to begin with.

but no one who's freaking out about it seems to be credibly approaching it from the "stolen valor" angle.

No one? Not one single person on planet Earth? Well sure then.

What's your definition of "someone"?

Do you think /r/antiwork is in any way representative of a typical McDonald's worker?

Well no, I think a typical worker in service industry or any other low-paid job posts on TikTok, not Reddit. Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit, or for example on various discords, they're closer to /r/antiwork in their ideology than to "it's 'onest work".

This isn't about The Motte. It's one of those things that has visceral resonance, and the more you push back against it, the more it will look like Trump had a point to begin with.

Unfortunately, our visceral resonances seem to be at odds.

No one? Not one single person on planet Earth? Well sure then.

Most people on planet Earth have never heard about it. Most people who will see this will think "heh, that's kinda funny". Somewhere, out there, there might be some lonely indivuduals upset at the valor stolen from service workers, but they'll be drowned out by legions that are upset that Trump did something mildly appealing to the common folk.

Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit, or for example on various discords, they're closer to /r/antiwork in their ideology than to "it's 'onest work".

"Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit" had to pass through so many filters that it will bear no resemblance to any remotely normal person. Reddit is a propaganda platform.

Unfortunately, our visceral resonances seem to be at odds.

I know this will sound weird, but I don't know if I believe you. Kavanaugh being a rapist vs. not was a disagreement of visceral resonances, Rittenhouse being a murderer vs. an innocent kid was a disagreement of visceral resonances... but this? The only visceral feeling I get here from the progressive side is "Trump bad. This good for Trump, therefore this bad".

but they'll be drowned out by legions that are upset that Trump did something mildly appealing to the common folk.

Where are those legions who express the belief that it is unbefitting of Trump to appeal to the common folk (as opposed to saying it's wrong to falsely appeal)? I've linked mine.

"Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit" had to pass through so many filters that it will bear no resemblance to any remotely normal person. Reddit is a propaganda platform.

What's your platform that is not a propaganda platform?

The only visceral feeling I get here

Here on the Motte? If not, then where?

I agree with other users that it's a clever publicity stunt, in that it will work with his base and the opposing base, naturally, is irrelevant to him. It's also bad, in my personal opinion, because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never (in my knowledge) done. If Kamala is acting like her time at McDonalds was a nightmare, she's at least being honest even if she'll alienate the voters (likely red-voting anyway) who think menial work is always ennobling.

Where are those legions who express the belief that it is unbefitting of Trump to appeal to the common folk (as opposed to saying it's wrong to falsely appeal)? I've linked mine.

It's the same link. You don't really expect people to outright say "damn that Trump, why is he so appealing?" even that's what they feel, do you?

What's your platform that is not a propaganda platform

We're running short on those these days. I guess you can still post anything you want on Substack.

It's also bad, in my personal opinion, because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never done

I'd chalk it up to getting upset at Gillette's slogan again, except:

If Kamala is acting like her time at McDonalds was a nightmare, she's at least being honest

This is completely backwards. There is no evidence she has spent a single day working in McDonalds. It's Trump who's honest here because his "lie" is just advertising, and everybody knows how it works. Kamala is the dishonest one, because people (including you) actually believe she made a factual statement about herself.

This is also how we know people upset at this aren't upset at dishonesty or stolen valor. No one who is criticizing Trump for this will turn around to criticize Harris, when it's pointed out she didn't work for McDonald's.

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I don’t think republicans think menial labor is per se ennobling. Instead, it is admirable to work instead of take hand me outs. That is, I don’t want people to stay working at menial jobs but if they start there and work hard in an effort to move up — kudos!

because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never (in my knowledge) done

Yes, but associating yourself with them is the thing you have to do if you want to manage a company filled with the people doing those things regardless of whether you see yourself as above them or not (which you'll recognize as the stereotypical Karen mindset).

That is [one of] your job[s] in that position; Kamala is refusing to do that job.

(And that's completely ignoring the "leader is himself a servant" thing being... kind of foundational to the "Protestant" part of "Protestant work ethic".)

these humanizing events really undermine the narrative

Do they?

Even dictators can do a good photo op.

Even dictators can do a good photo op.

No, they can't. Their attempts to be cool are all cringe and gay.

Trump hit a real nerve here. People liked what they saw. The common touch is not easy to fake. Witness the multiple attempts by Harris proxies to do the same and fail.

Attack Trump for his policies all you want, but he can speak to the people in a way that few politicians can. He's not a phony.

They don't want to let it get to the "funny pic of Gaddafi or Putin shirtless on a horse" stage. They want it to stay at the "ominous devil figure" stage. The former implies some fatalism.

They've never made their peace with the fact that their country can elect someone like Trump and they don't want anyone else to either. Ironically, it's the "where my country gone?" meme they mocked for so long.

While Trump is making a correct move by being among his voters and not hiding in an ivory tower McDonalds isn't exactly a great brand to be associated with. Why associate yourself with unhealthy, bland consumerist food? Mcdonalds should represent the opposite of what the right stands for. It is the antithesis of tradition, beauty, culture, small business and family.

Because that's America's burger. Unhealthy, bland, consumerist food that takes advantage of a weird strategy to make money on real estate and not the actual burger is America.

That's America's president. America, as it exists today, is the antithesis of tradition, beauty, culture, small business and family. It has spent the last fifty years gleefully tearing down tradition and family, and when it's not actively hostile to small business it's trying to buy them out or crush them. It defines culture as being what the majority don't like and beauty as what the majority enjoy because they are stupid.

McDonalds is one of America's most successful cultural exports next to the Internet and pre-2020s Hollywood. Your opinion on McDonalds aside, it is an American institution, built by Americans, and is wildly successful.

Why associate yourself with unhealthy, bland consumerist food?

The quarter pounder is one of the top 3 fast food burgers out there (especially in its double permutation) and is ubiquitously available. Wendy's has fallen off completely, Burger King has blown for more than a decade, and you need to cede a significant fraction of a minimum wage paycheck for Five Guys or Shake Shack, if you live near one.

The app performs reasonably well and you can actually get the food you order 90% of the time, unlike a bone-in-chicken place. It's really not that bad.

Maybe the right should be against it but I can't imagine going back a decade and telling people Trump's brand is incompatible with bland consumerism.

When I drive cross-country, McDonalds has the most reliably clean restrooms, and they don't insist on you buying stuff first. (The one exception to that I found was in a Denver suburb, where they had a sign on the bathroom saying "For customers only". I asked a worker to let me and the kids in, and she did without any questions, and without requiring a purchase. I guess that's to discourage the local homeless.)

The food is also fine. I don't subsist on it, but an occasional chicken sandwich isn't going to kill me any faster than anything else I can get quickly on the road.

(The one exception to that I found was in a Denver suburb, where they had a sign on the bathroom saying "For customers only".

This is pretty common IME in areas where crime and homeless are legitimate concerns.

The food is also fine. I don't subsist on it, but an occasional chicken sandwich isn't going to kill me any faster than anything else I can get quickly on the road.

Yeah, people exaggerate how unhealthy typical McDonald's food is. Their cokes are the exact same ones you can get anywhere else, their fries and burgers and nuggets contain more additives than elsewhere but have roughly similar macros, it's the 'treats'- frappes and mcflurries and deserts- that kill people there, and that's mostly just from McDonald's cornering the market. And even then, a bunch of this is really more like a starbucks drink, just to lower class clientele.

None of this is health food, but McDonald's is lower class and really common, so it makes an easy scapegoat.

Yeah, people exaggerate how unhealthy typical McDonald's food is. Their cokes are the exact same ones you can get anywhere else, their fries and burgers and nuggets contain more additives than elsewhere but have roughly similar macros, it's the 'treats'- frappes and mcflurries and deserts- that kill people there, and that's mostly just from McDonald's cornering the market. And even then, a bunch of this is really more like a starbucks drink, just to lower class clientele.

It's not unhealthy in relative terms, but it's still unhealthy. Fries, sauces, treats and non-diet coke are terrible. Nuggets are okay. Burgers are okay. But no one orders just a burger. If you have small fries with buffalo sauce, a small coke and a cone with your burger, the macros are not that bad. For a dinner. But if it's medium fries with ranch, a medium coke and a regular M&M's soft serve, it's many more calories than anyone who's not a miner or a lumberjack needs.

But if it's medium fries with ranch, a medium coke and a regular M&M's soft serve

Wait, I could have been getting fries with ranch or buffalo sauce all this time? Dang, maybe I do wish people would upsell me sometimes and not just offer me the pies (which I think have the highest calorie to dollar ratio of any fast food menu item ever).

But no one orders just a burger.

I was under the impression that everyone orders the standard meal. And if you do that, you're still coming in around 1K calories; you could go twice a day if you actually wanted to and be treading water, calorically speaking. Maybe if you get the mocha/lattes you'd be pushing 1400 but their coffee (that is not actually offered in the US locations, so maybe it doesn't apply as much) is good enough there's no reason to bother.

If I had to guess I'd say McDonalds optimizes its meals around 1000 calories specifically because these days it says so right beside the thing on the menu, where other places are usually pushing 1300-1400 for their default meal, which means your other meal now has to be smaller to compensate especially if you only eat twice a day and work a sedentary job.

Trump is associating himself with working at McDonald’s, not with it as a cornerstone of the American diet. One in eight Americans have worked at McDonald’s- statistically, Trump is showing that he’s not too good for an incredibly common American experience.

Now obviously it’s a campaign stunt. But it’s a clever campaign stunt that plays into his Everyman image.

But it’s a clever campaign stunt that plays into his Everyman image.

Has Trump ever had an "Everyman" image? As far as I can recall, Trump has always represented a billionaire business tycoon. Maybe he acts the same way an average person would act if they won the lottery (gold plated toilets, supermodel wives, etc.) but I don't think he was ever a true "Everyman" in the same way Homer Simpson is.

He's definitely done the 'Boss swaps jobs with a worker' schtick before with good results.

The video of this was freely available until recently, but I've been trying to search for it in Youtube and it seemed to have been memory holed until I found it through external search engines.

Edit: Clip was from Oprah's show in 2011.

Trump has always had a bit of a plebian sense of wealth. The expression a decade ago was that Trump lived like how poor people thought the rich lived, as opposed to how the rich actually lived. In that sense, he's the 'what the Everyman would see himself doing if he had Trump's wealth.'

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

The following is a transcript of a conversation I had with a friend which I think is relevant. I have recreated it as closely as possible.

clo: Work is shit. Humans can become accustomed to completely terrible conditions. Thrive in them, even. So why do people hate work? Why are there so many grifters, liars, cheats, when honest work seems, genuinely, easier? Because work is shit. People would rather debase themselves on Onlyfans or spend 18 hours editing some shitty yt video than work.

hv: arguably, it is working for a living. there's a streamer a mate watches, mainly does Resident Evil successful. chatter asks what it's like and how to get started themselves. his answer: "it's a job". he wakes up, has breakfast, maybe exercises, then plays Resident Evil for 12 hours, takes holidays, gets breaks, he's not in a cubicle, but yeah. that's work. I'd put money on guessing that most grifts are pretty fuckin' hard work too. people like to gloss over exactly how much effort and work things take because, yeah, it's ugly.

clo: Yeah but have you thought about why they did that. Over working. That's the question

hv: they are working, though

clo: not my question

hv: or are you drawing a line between working for themselves or someone else?

clo: Why did the guy choose to play RE for money, over say, getting a job? I refuse to believe there aren't jobs that pay more, especially now? Why would someone work for Rooster Teeth over like, I don't know, taking a minimum hours job in db admin.

hv: well in all these comparisons it sems to boil down to "working for yourself" or "working for someone else, who pays you"

clo: I've worked all through coof. I've had (counting) six jobs, and the whole thing reminds me, depressingly, of the replacement debate. People aren't honest because the honest answer is bad. They can say it's money or qualifications, and those are definitely factors. But I think it comes down to this: people hate work because modern workplaces are fucking dogshit for self respect. It's not the pay, it's not even the working conditions, it's the fact that you have to swallow your balls and watch as shit rolls over you from on top. that's literally it

hv: we agree on this, shit rolls downhill. why would anyone want to start climbing?

clo: I think this is all. And I wish it could be solved. Certain people do climb in this system and that's also why, you built a system that self selects for cowards and psychopaths. People say it's money, I don't think so. I've witnessed people turn down money to stay low. I've personally worked at two companies that were known for underpaying employees but treated their employees like human beings. They never had trouble retaining. In fact, people left and then came back. This is why someone would rather try and make pennies streaming Fortnite, than even take a mcjob for a couple months, because you'd have to swallow your pride for a half fucking second and just bend over and take it. You will be reminded of it every second of every day. And if you forget, the job won't let you forget. It's like being a prison bitch. Everyone knows. You know.

hv: yeeeeeah I think this is what got galvanized working at the last two places

clo: So that's why people are checking out. The depressing fucking thing is, working from home changed that. It gave people back a modicum of self respect

hv: AND THEY IMMEDIATELY TRIED TO TAKE IT AWAY LMFAO, YES

clo: it resulted in a flood of people quitting. In some case they don't come back even for 50% more salary, I've seen the numbers. So yeah, kids want to grow up to be a streamer. Being a streamer is pretty much objectively shit unless you are the 0.01%

hv: "content creator"

clo: You have zero job security and are dependent on algorithms and how much Twitch feels like losing. But people would rather do that than be a prison bitch, because you would know you were a prison bitch. People don't respond well to being told what to do. And to have your material existence and quality of life being used as blackmail against you to make you do as you're told - which, let's face it, is exactly what work feels like even though it's not what it actually is in a lot of cases, well... In the rumored words of Churchill, badly paraphrased, you already know you're a whore. The rest of it is haggling about the price. Wallstreetbets openly advertises how horrible it is to your financial well being, but people continue to yeet their life savings into it at warp speed. Why is that? It's because if they win, they're nobody's bitch

hv: Fuck You Money

clo: Now are you capable of finding your own path to money? Or are you a bitch?

hv: this plays into why people are finding it harder to get into relationships, doesn't it

clo: A relationship is work. We know it's not work for some people. We know because we see it and they tell us how great it is (or are lying). So why are we working for it? Fuck this!

The arrogance: the email server.

For a second I forgot about the specific Hillary context and reacted to this with, "What's wrong with Exchange admins!?"

There is a lot to this. Upvoted and AAQC'd, but I wanted to put one of the resident motteizean blue collar workers on record as saying- I see this attitude every day. You want to know why working class voters of all races, especially white ones, are turning against the DNC? Because their politicians come off as our hired bosses- managers, not owner-men, and especially as the HR people and managers of whatever the fuck who get left to deliver bad news when the actual bosses don't want to-, and the GOP pols come off as people who worked to build their own businesses.

Of course this is a false impression, and of course I have my own disagreements with democrat policies. But politics is vibes based.

Why is it a false impression though?

People who build their own business are more likely to be Republican than the PMC. It's not the whole story, obviously, but nothing is.

Nothing will turn a person Republican faster than owning their own business and seeing the heaping pile of shit that the government throws at you every chance you get.

It's a false impression because there are very few politicians of either description. Democrats running for office have mostly been in government service since they finished college and republicans running for office may have had careers beforehand, but usually as like, investment bankers and the like- few started businesses.

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Note that Trump is already heavily associated with having McDonald's as a cornerstone of the American diet.

Mcdonalds should represent the opposite of what the right stands for. It is the antithesis of tradition, beauty, culture, small business and family.

On the contrary, McDonald’s represents the true culture of the American proletariat. You may never have worked at McDonald’s, but you know someone who worked at McDonald’s. The elitist liberal media says that McDonald’s is unhealthy slop, but deep down, you know the truth. every blue-collar worker in America has done great things fueled by a quick stop at McDonald’s.

The elitist liberal media says that McDonald’s is unhealthy slop, but deep down, you know the truth.

Yup. Very few people are deluding themselves that a McDonalds burger is healthy, but it's honest. Yeah, ground beef isn't the healthiest meat, white bread buns aren't the most nutritious either, but from remembering what I used to think when I was a liberal 15 years ago, it's as if McDonalds had an Underpants Gnome-like scheme that increased their profits from sneaking in toxic sludge inside their food and customer base.

Now, Portillo's Chocolate Cake Shake, that is one thing that on my last trip to the US that I couldn't allow myself to eat just from looking at the caloric intake it represented. That actually seemed like it was designed to bring ruination to a body.

While i do appreciate that mcdonalds uses real beef patties in their staple burgers, they also peddle a lot of weird stuff that kindof pretends to be something else. If you look at their website that describes a hamburger you may notice that the line where they say they dont use fillers/preservatives etc has an asterisk next to it. The asterisk is because this claim only applies to their nationally available permanent hamburger menu items. Chicken nuggets for instance do not adhere to a strict chicken and breading philosophy.

I agree that the hippyish mindset of mcdonalds being made of dead pig anuses is a fantasy, but i dont think the mc rib is what i would consider "honest" food. Their french fries contain Hydrolyzed Wheat, so a usually gluten free food is not gluten free at mcdonalds.

I guess my point is that while i dont hate mcdonalds i would be wary of lionizing them with the word "honest"

Interesting and... kind of true? I think it was Kerouac who presented roadside hamburger stands as the embodiment of the Great American Spirit (maybe On the Road, but could have been a more obscure book) and Steinbeck definitely raved about mobile homes in Travels with Charley. (in which he drives around in a camper-truck and does DIY veterinary interventions on his poodle in 60s USA)

Why associate yourself with unhealthy, bland consumerist food? Mcdonalds should represent the opposite of what the right stands for. It is the antithesis of tradition, beauty, culture, small business and family.

I really can't get myself into the headspace of someone who doesn't understand what this stunt is about.

McDonnald's is low-status precisely for the reasons you point out, but people eat there because it's affordable, and they work there because they'll hire anyone right off the street. He's showing he's on the side of people dismissed as "low-status".

It's not affordable anymore though, so he's a bit late.

Late news. They pivoted back.

$6 now gets you a McDouble, small fries, 4 piece nuggets, and a small coke. Counting app rewards all-in cost is closer to $5. It's real cheap.

But they do screw people who order a la carte items now.

It is, you just have to use the app.

If you ever find a mcdonalds app on my phone I'm already dead and robbed. :)

How are they not bankrupt? It was their only redeeming quality.

It can still be, it's just that they've tiered their offering to extract more money at the top of the market. They probably realized there's a lot of people eating at McDonald's who don't really go because it's cheap, and would be willing to pay over 10$ for a trio, so they added items for that market, but you can still eat what I'd call a full meal for around 5 US dollars.

Couple of things-

  1. McDonald’s is not exactly cheap, but it is slightly cheaper than the competition. Some people actually want and like greasy fast food and McDonalds is on the affordable end.

  2. Poor people really like McDonald’s treats for whatever reason. Think frappes and the like. I think it has to do with the amount of sugar in it.

  3. McDonald’s offers a lot of deals and coupons and the like. I have no interest in minmaxing for cheap Mickey d’s, but someone who wants to can easily do so rather effectively.

  4. McDonald’s stores are owned by franchisees, and corporate makes their money by extracting rent from franchisees with only a limited effect from sales.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or if basic reasoning is actually at an all time low, but the “debunking” that the store preselected customers and that it was just for a photo op is absurd. (Top post on Reddit for the week is approximately that). Like yeah, of course they didn’t allow a presidential candidate with 3x attempts on his life to serve anyone driving by. Do they have any idea how risky it would be to do that, even if you scanned all the cars beforehand? Of course it was just for photos — do they think he was genuinely employed there? None of these debunk or detect an iota of the spectacle, but that they are shilled so hard signals that there really are low IQ Americans who are persuaded by this. The Reddit political propaganda in recent weeks has also been lots of “look at this photo taken at an inopportune moment that makes him look bad”, like the Elon Musk jumping photo. Yeah, if 20 photographers take 500 photos each, some are destined to make the subject look bad.

widely seen as trashy and disrespectful

I disagree. It was widely seen as awesome, including by those in attendance. It was narrowly seen as trashy by snotty rich progressives who don’t want to admit they enjoy the occasional fast food.

that it was fake

Duh, he's a politician on the campaign trail. There's something "It's Okay To Be White" about this, where most of the propaganda value of the stunt is in the reaction. A lot has been said about Trump's decline, and I agree, he's not the same man he was in 2016, but either he, or someone running his campaign, still seems to have the touch.

He seems kind of on fire lately TBH -- he may not be quite as sharp as 2016, but he's gotten back into the 'generate free advertising by trolling the MSM' groove finally.

I fully expect to be well entertained for the next couple of weeks.

What do you think will happen with regards to the department of education in the US depending on the results of the election?

For my part it seems like the left would just keep watering it down, more of the same etc. There doesn't seem to be any acknowledgment of issues over there.

I’m also not optimistic that the right will do much either though, republicans have tended to be very Ham fisted in the past with this sort of reform.

Anyone have interesting or different perspectives here?

If it came with a total nuke of common core, most americans would consider the swap of the guard a success.

What is so bad about common core? From what I've seen, it's a boring inoffensive educational standard.

If the entirety of the funding of the Department of Education was instead given as a block grant to the state-level organizations things would get marginally better, if only for the fact that dumb progressive fads thought up by PhDs who never taught in a classroom can't be imposed from the top-down anymore.

That this approach would be true for every policy-creating federal organization is the great secret of politics.

The dumb progressive fads aren't coming from the federal agencies, they're coming from the education schools.

Can someone steelman the value of the Department of Education?

What if we literally just removed it? I'm a little confused why the federal government is involved at all. And, if they are involved, then surely they deserve to be disbanded for the horrible failures in places like Chicago and Baltimore.

It depends on what you mean by "disbanding" the Department of Education. Its abolition has supposedly been a top priority of Republicans more or less from the day it was established, yet I think its nameplate budget and the implication that Federal bureaucrats are meddling in what is supposed to be a local concern create a perception of it that doesn't square with reality. So it largely means whether you're talking about a symbolic reorganization wherein the Department's functions are simply divided among other government agencies, or elimination of the actual programs the Department administers.

We can easily dismiss the first option, since it wouldn't result in any substantive changes other than the huge bill involved for administrative costs relating to the reorganization. At the very least, I'd need to see some sort of comprehensive study suggesting that the cost savings of such a reorganization would justify the cost of doing it. If we're talking about the second option, we need to look at what the Department actually does.

60% of the Department's budget is related to higher education assistance, split roughly evenly between direct loans and Pell Grants. I imagine we'd both agree that the student loan system in this country is fucked up and probably responsible for the massive cost increases schools have been experiencing for decades, but this isn't something we can just eliminate overnight. I've seen statistics that suggest Federal student loan and tuition assistance accounts for about 18% of revenue for 4-year public universities. At first glance, no institution can afford to lose 18% of revenue overnight. But it's actually more than this. The same statistics show that 28% of revenue comes from "sales and services". This theoretically includes everything from profits made from the bookstore to t-shirt sales, but the vast majority of this is revenue from university-associated hospitals. While this technically counts toward the entire institution's revenue, I'd imagine that hospital fees subsidize education about as much as tuition covers the costs of the hospital. In other words, these are functionally separate entities whose only real overlap is that the hospital is a teaching hospital for the medical school, so I'm keeping this separate. Doing that, Federal support now accounts for up to 25% of revenue. As I said earlier, I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis. Not to mention the fact that a lot of existing students will find themselves with debt from unfinished degrees they can't afford to complete. I'd prefer a system that makes eligibility for federal funding contingent on cost-control, but such a system would require more Federal oversight, not less. This, of course, doesn't even account for all the existing loans that the Department services.

Beyond that huge chunk of the budget, about 15% each goes to Title I grants and special education grants. Title I grants are grants to schools with low-income students to pay for remedial reading and math services. While this may give the impression that the funding goes to low-income school districts, pretty much every school qualifies for some level of targeted funding. Again, the result will be that these programs will be cut entirely or simply replaced by state or local funding, which may be difficult in some areas.

So now we're down to the 10% of the budget that accounts for miscellaneous items like compiling certain statistics, administrative costs, etc. I'm sure there's stuff here that can be cut, but eliminating an entire cabinet-level department in order to trim out a little fat seems like an inefficient way of doing things. Unless we're willing to make some serious changes to education funding and the student loan system in the United States, and talk of eliminating the Department of Education is nothing more than a buzzword that shows we're Serious About Doing Something, so long as that something doesn't actually do anything. If the goal is to eliminate student loans or remedial and special education funding entirely then that's the discussion we should be having, not some red-herring thing where eliminating a department will magically eliminate 200 billion dollars from the budget.

this isn't something we can just eliminate overnight

Why not? It seems rather simple to me to just declare that the offices will be closing and programs will all be ending on such-and-such date.

This is a general point that I'm not aiming at you in particular @Rov_Scam but I've noticed that people (on all sides) use "can't" to mean "shouldn't". The "can't" is hiding an unspoken "because X consequences will result". Sometimes this happens because X is literally unthinkable for the speaker, or because they consider it too obvious to need saying, or because they haven't thought their response through all the way. Sometimes (from professionals) it's a manipulative rhetorical tactic.

You actually elaborate more later, saying that we can't abolish the Department of Educator overnight because it would throw higher education into crisis, and strand students with unfinished degrees. But so many people don't. They say things like, we can't halt immigration, we can't withdraw from green treaty requirements, we can't ignore calls for reparations. I would urge people to write/demand the full argument whenever they find "can't" being used for something that isn't actually physically impossible. I think it encourages more rigorous thinking and more clear lines of debate.

It's not just in political discourse either....

but this isn't something we can just eliminate overnight.

Why not? It seems rather simple to me to just declare that the offices will be closing and programs will all be ending on such-and-such date.

I've seen statistics that suggest Federal student loan and tuition assistance accounts for about 18% of revenue for 4-year public universities. At first glance, no institution can afford to lose 18% of revenue overnight.

So what? If anything, this 18% isn't big enough.

Doing that, Federal support now accounts for up to 25% of revenue. As I said earlier, I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis.

And what's so bad about that? Besides, that is, that it doesn't go far enough. The "entire higher education system" doesn't need "thrown into crisis"… it needs to be burned down — somewhere between Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and Qin Shi Huang's burning of books and burying of scholars (including the executions).

May I ask what it is you do for a living?

This is a great steelman and I really appreciate the comprehensive reply.

This is a great example of how the federal bureaucracy uses funding to weave itself into every fiber of an education system that should be, in theory, nearly completely independent of the federal government.

The argument for getting rid of the department, I suppose, hinges on the belief that it will never be easier to expunge than it is right now. In another 20 years it will just be that much harder.

And if we take a targeted and incremental approach, it will be argued about for 4 years, something minor will happen, and then all the changes will be undone the next time there is a political shift in the wind. Instead of cleaning the barnacles from the stuffed pipe, better to remove the pipe entirely, even if it's disruptive.

But obviously this is wishcasting, and we're likely just stuck with more barnacles forever.

I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis.

As of the end of FY 2021, American college and university endowments totaled over $927 billion, up 34% from $691 billion at the start of the fiscal year. That slightly outpaced the S&P 500's growth during the same period, which was only up 26%. Even if FY 2022 and 2023 weren't quite as bumper years, the tertiary education system in the U.S. undoubtedly has at least $1 trillion in the bank, not to mention that most of the top research universities are also state institutions, with direct support from state-level taxpayers.

There's plenty of money to go around.

Endowments aren't piggy banks that schools can raid whenever they need quick cash. They consist of donor-restricted funds that have strict guidelines on how they can be spent and invested; the purpose of the underlying donations is to fund specific things in perpetuity. If a wealthy donor gives you 5 million to fund the George V. Hamilton Professor of East Asian History (who will be making 200k/year), you can't just fire the professor and spend whatever's left in the endowment. If, for whatever reason, you wanted to end the professorship, you'd have to follow whatever procedures were specified in the original donation to end the endowment, usually under the supervision of the state attorney general. Yeah, these numbers are huge. But they're meant for funding things that are, by definition, already funded.

Some endowment donations are subject to that tight of a restriction, sure. However, there are also unrestricted donations which may be put towards general educational purposes, and donations whose restrictions are much more flexible (for example, a donation restricted to the support of a school's history department generally could likely be used for just about anything - professor salaries, administrative support, facilities maintenance, student scholarships/grants, archival and research purchases, etc.)

Of course, far more common is a restriction that the principal of an endowment can't be spent; only the profits flowing from investment of that principal, which makes endowment absolute numbers a bit deceptive. Given the speed with which endowments have been growing recently, I'm not that worried about this.

Ultimately, colleges and universities are known for being masterful in manipulating bureaucratic processes to achieve their desired results, no matter what the black letter law may say (see, e.g. the lengths administrations have gone to in order to enshrine race-based preferences in admissions). I'm confident that they'd find a way to put that money to real productive work if they had to.

If a wealthy donor gives you 5 million to fund the George V. Hamilton Professor of East Asian History (who will be making 200k/year), you can't just fire the professor and spend whatever's left in the endowment.

How true is this? At some point, rules against perpetual trusts must surely apply. And if they don't apply well.. they should.

It's unconscionable for huge chunks of the economy to be tied up by the wishes of long dead people.

It's time to tax the endowments.

The law is excruciatingly clear that perpetuity limits don't apply to charitable donations, or charitable trusts, for that matter. Technically speaking, the Rule Against Perpetuities only applies to contingent remainders and executory interests, and charitable donations have neither. Practically speaking, courts and legislators are reluctant to invoke perpetuity limits on charities as a matter of public policy. I'm on the board of a nonprofit, and large donations to the general fund are rare. You can get this money from annual fundraising events, membership fees, and small donations, but if someone is looking to drop serious cash they're going to want to know in advance what projects you have coming up that it can be used for. If your projects consist of ongoing expenses, like salaries or scholarships, you'll need to raise about 20 times the annual cost and invest it so the money is always available. The alternative is that people just don't donate because they don't want their money going into a black hole. Sometimes you can get out of it, but usually only in extraordinary circumstances, and even then you'll need court approval and have to notify the AG. There's a lot of fuckery surrounding charitable orgs as it is, and removing restrictions without good reason only encourages that kind of fuckery.

Dang. It's worse than I thought. Thanks for the color. Your posts are always very informative.

I wonder what percentage of wealth is controlled by dead hands at this point?

Of course, in reality, it's often worse than dead hands. It's very live hands with a radical agenda and no accountability. Imagine if Henry Ford could see what his foundation is up to today. These endowments simply must be taxed. I'm always blown away by how much wealth they control, and how it's controlled by a group of elites who have almost no checks and balances. (The whole OpenAI fiasco shined a light on non-profit boards that way).

There are random foundations all over the country with billion dollar endowments. For example, the Kellogg foundation in Battle Creek Michigan has $8.8 billion.

I'm not sure I can steelman it but my sister is a fairly high-level employee there (GS 13 or 14--I should probably know). She works specifically with the adult education department (which is never mentioned nor considered when people complain about DoE, IMO) and doesn't have a ton to say about K-12. Everything that follows is my understanding of what she's told me, not heavily researched data.

She points out that most of what the DoE does, I think she said 1/3-1/2 of the budget(?) is managing FAFSA. Most of the K-12 stuff is state level with recommendations from DoE with few hard requirements. Another major part of what they do is fund research programs that either focus on specific groups and methodologies, or collect data for analysis. She's pretty adamant that what people think they hate about the DoE is not really what the DoE does. She also claims that were the DoE disbanded, half of the people would go to the Dept. of Labor (where DoE originated from) and others would go to places like Dept. of Health and Human Services. That removing the DoE wouldn't really do anything except push bureaucrats around.

I mused out loud that maybe it wouldn't be the end of the world if it were disbanded and it nearly destroyed our relationship. She complains bitterly about being passed over for promotions and the ineptitude of her co-workers. She seems bitter and resentful, so as her brother I wonder if there isn't a better job out there for her to be doing. Her position is that it's an easy job she almost literally phones in (she's on the phone constantly with researchers and other DoE people) and it allows her to donate half her money to charities (not much of an exaggeration) and time for volunteering. She's deeply motivated to help the less-fortunate, but also seems like the exact type of bureaucratic cat lady people are complaining about.

To me, it seems to me that Dept's of Ed belong to state level bureaucracies. It makes sense to keep it federated and the states in light competition with each other. However, I also see some value in the FAFSA. The government providing some funds and low interest loans to students who may want to go to universities anywhere in the US seems fine to me. It's at least using taxes to put some money back into some peoples' hands. But that's fairly weak support as I'm not certain university degrees aren't overvalued in the first place nor can I attest to any fraud waste or abuse inherent in the system. (There are DoE programs for jobs programs and The adult education angle is interesting to me because we really do have a problem with under-educated adults in the US, either those who failed out of crummy schools, the chronically unmotivated or those who arrived here without the ability to read or speak English, etc. But I'm still not sure why this shouldn't be a state or even municipal level organization.)

It's a strange superposition: I'm not inclined to save it but I also doubt that it's the pernicious institution others are convinced of. It definitely looks like a make-work program when I hear about the morons my sister has to deal with on the daily, but it also doesn't seem like it's nearly as powerful as the people who hate it claim. I'm mostly indifferent and probably bend a little toward keeping it for my own peace of mind and QoL.

She also claims that were the DoE disbanded, half of the people would go to the Dept. of Labor (where DoE originated from) and others would go to places like Dept. of Health and Human Services. That removing the DoE wouldn't really do anything except push bureaucrats around.

This seems to be a strange hypothetical where the DoE is axed but its full budget is reallocated to the most similar departments. It seems like anyone who would actually axe the DoE would either be looking to shrink the federal government's budget or would at least move the money into very different departments.

I don't hate the federal government as much as most people here do, and I think we could live without the DoE. To the degree they do anything useful, it's what your sister described: managing funds, financial aid, etc. That doesn't require an entire department of the government.

GS 13-14 isn't particularly "high level," btw. It's relatively late career (lots of people retire as a 13 or 14), but it's not someone with significant decision-makiing or policy-shaping authority. That starts at 15 and the real high level people are those who make it to the Senior Executive Services.

She also claims that were the DoE disbanded, half of the people would go to the Dept. of Labor (where DoE originated from) and others would go to places like Dept. of Health and Human Services. That removing the DoE wouldn't really do anything except push bureaucrats around.

I don't think is the argument she thinks it is. All that does is paint a target on two more departments that should probably be axed as well. The point is not to push bureaucrats around, it's to have fewer bureaucrats. As Milei has put it, afuera!

She's deeply motivated to help the less-fortunate, but also seems like the exact type of bureaucratic cat lady people are complaining about.

Yes, exactly this. This kind of bureaucrat should not be paid by the taxes of productive people. If they were actually providing value, they would be remunerated in private enterprise by people who need to produce products or services in exchange for revenue, and their remuneration would be constrained by the revenue they could generate.

Two of my in-laws are a pair of public school teachers, and I think the same thing about them. If they were truly valuable, they would be working in private schools where the school itself must generate revenue by performing valuable functions, not simply awarded money by the state which is extracted from captive taxpayers. Thus, they are not valuable, and are instead parasitic.

It's not a very nice way to think about your relatives, but it's the inescapable conclusion I come to.

It's at least using taxes to put some money back into some peoples' hands.

The people, in this case, being the administrators of the institutions that end up receiving these funds. I say administrators, because that is what has seen the growth in employment in the last two decades.

If they were truly valuable, they would be working in private schools where the school itself must generate revenue by performing valuable functions, not simply awarded money by the state which is extracted from captive taxpayers. Thus, they are not valuable, and are instead parasitic.

This is highly confounded by the fact that public spending has greatly crowded out the private school market. If your option is a public school which costs (after taxes and fees) nothing vs. a private school of about the same quality and costs thousands of dollars a semester, it would be irrational to take the latter option. If public schools didn't exist at all, there would undoubtedly be more private schools, needing to hire more teachers.

Yes, but those private school teachers would be (and are) more liable for results, as a teacher failing to teach would result in parents pulling their kids. Same thing with administrators, as they’re strictly a cost center.

That is in stark contrast to what we have now, where they’re functionally impossible to fire consistently for anything less than literally fucking the students.

One reason why it's best to fire en masse and then rehire as needed.

No (wo)man, no problem.

Fortunately for the statistically average bureaucrat, we have an aversion to physically removing them as ancient societies would do (since they’d all be men).

Unfortunately for the average bureaucrat, they’ll be financially ruined. Career prospects for former welfare recipients are not great- good thing they didn’t import a ton of workers that don’t even make a minimum wage too slim to support a decent lifestyle through a cost disease they pushed for… oh wait, that’s exactly what they did.

The Progressive party machine is, quite literally, their only lifeline. And they know it only exists so long as they continue tricking young women into thinking they’ll get a permanent paycheque out of [young] men if they keep voting for it in a pyramid scheme even larger than Social Security.

It’s a faction of Amway ladies.

And they know it only exists so long as they continue tricking young women into thinking they’ll get a permanent paycheque out of [young] men if they keep voting for it in a pyramid scheme even larger than Social Security.

What trick? The bureaucracy is only expanding.

Yes, the distorting effect of government is one of its worst features.

There's a pretty straightforward steelman for a Department of Education:

  • There are significant economies of scale, many of which are hard to exploit at the county or even state level. Curriculum, IT, large bulk purchasing orders, software development, so on. There are dangers to overoptimizing here -- putting all your eggs in one development basket means a lot of vulnerability where errors pop up -- but it's not unreasonable.
  • There are likely to be mismatches between jurisdictions with higher tax bases and those with large numbers of people who are seeking education. While I'd rather fix the parts of the Richmond Fed philosophy that has made the disparity as large as it's gotten, we demonstrably aren't doing that, so having some way to keep primary education funding from going bonkers or depending on a million local levies has both practical and political benefits.
  • If you're doing federal funding of higher education, you want some level of oversight to prevent it from getting used for absolute garbage, either in the sense of schools that teach nothing, or in the sense of degrees that have no value when learned.

The trouble is that's not really what our DoEd does.

What does the DoEd do in practice?

By dollar, the DoEd's main job (185b in 2024) is offering scholarships, grants, loan guarantees, and other higher education funding. It directly measures students. Measurements of school and program value overwhelmingly come through college accreditation, which is kinda a clusterfuck: the DoEd establishes reporting requirements and rules for accrediting bodies to follow, but those accrediting organizations themselves are technically 'private' organizations and have only begun acting against the worst-performing colleges in very recent years, and the threshold is both staggeringly low and readily gamed.

Charitably, these groups focus on process; less charitably, they're a deniable way to mandate a variety of rules that are politically costly or legally impermissible otherwise. Either way, they're not doing the job, and the DoEd isn't even the ones not doing it, just telling people to do other stuff instead.

((Colleges do not technically need accreditation to operate, but a college without accreditation is unable to receive most federal or federally-guaranteed funds and has very wide restrictions on its ability to transfer credit hours.))

For primary education, the DoEd has significant expenditures and grants (40b in 2024), but this is largely focused on perceived deserts, not on local funding availability. In some rare cases these overlap -- the Office of Indian Education has a bad reputation for other reasons than having difficulty finding poor kids -- but it's at least part of the reason that all the stories about racial education spending has a big asterisk about 'before public funding', and, more critically those schools still suck even as they often vastly outspend far better schools.

For curriculum, it's mostly just a mess. The DoEd sets up grants for individual assessments and projects, but it's neither a major focus nor really done at larger scale, for better or worse (eg, CommonCore is technically a National Governor's Association baby).

Attach strings to accepting federal student loans.

It’s a jobs program, like much of the federal government, and without it ISD’s might do things like get their spending under control or teach effectively, which you can’t have.

I really don’t think I can defend the DoEd as a cost-effective educator. I do think it has value as a floor on provided education.

Most of its expenditures date back to 1965 Great Society programs. However, they’ve been consistently refreshed and revisited by both parties, because no one wants to turn off the firehose assume the burden themselves. Poor states don’t have a better plan waiting; slashing their only source of funding makes their options strictly worse. That may or may not be worth the tiny percentage of federal budget you’d save.

Poor states don’t have a better plan waiting

Do we still have any of those? Mississippi looks like it's still way down at the bottom of the list of US states, but the bottom of the US list is now at like $53K GDP per capita, which even if we use PPP for the nation as a whole still puts them ahead of such hellholes as Belgium, Canada, France, the UK, South Korea, Japan...

Edit: perhaps GDP per child is the right metric to use here? Mississippi is probably behind a few of the countries I just listed on that score, though I can't quickly find numbers and I still doubt the distinction would be large enough to matter.

You know, I’m really not sure. Mississippi isn’t exactly the poster child for income inequality, so it’s not like the per capita numbers are all skewed by one city.

Elsewhere I was seeing some evidence that title I funds were less than 10% of Mississippi’s education funding. If so, maybe all our states really can afford to take up more slack.

On the other hand, there’s got to be some sort of logistic curve. At some point you have to close sites and drop some people from the system entirely. If federal funding covers that cliff, I think removing it would be pretty serious.

Even if you have within-state income inequality, that can be solved at the state level. You need whole states who can't pay for their kids before you need a solution from a federal ...

Oh my. I was going to write "Dep. Ed." because "DoE" is ambiguous with Energy, but I decided to look it up and apparently the official abbreviation, at www.ed.gov, is in fact ED? "Son, I'm afraid you've got ED. I'm prescribing the Tenth Amendment, but be sure to call us immediately if you get a school board election lasting more than four hours!"

If federal funding covers that cliff, I think removing it would be pretty serious.

In theory, you could just make up for it with the extra state taxes that everyone can afford once the taxes which paid for the federal funding are reduced. In the short term, it could be a hell of a transition in the meantime. In the long term, I suspect the question of budget changes stemming from federal debt problems will dwarf budget changes stemming from how much interstate redistribution we do for schools.

I don't think anyone would conflate the Department of Education with Erectile Dysfunction as you imply.

One is an irritating and frustrating affliction most men would love to eradicate for good. The other is erectile dysfunction.

ED—especially when primed by a discussion on education-related administration, bureaucracy, and government transfers—more reminds me of those with "Doctorates" in Education (although Eating Disorder gets a nod). It's like Stolen Valor: They're trying to co-opt the prestige of PhDs, especially STEM PhDs, to lend themselves some notion of being sophisticated Experts on the right side of Science. This has not gone un-Noticed even among the general normie population, hence the "Excuse me! It's 'Doctor'!" versus "Call me Bob" meme.

I don't think anyone would conflate the Department of Education with Erectile Dysfunction as you imply.

One is an irritating and frustrating affliction most men would love to eradicate for good. The other is erectile dysfunction.

Just an aside, but is there a name or term for this particular variety of joke?

I’d call it a switcheroo joke, a species of paraprosdokian phrase. There may be a more precise technical term, but even Bing’s GPT-4 believes it to be the latter, citing a stand-up comedy site.

EDIT: Found it. It’s a bait-and-switch joke. Cognitohazard: here’s a list of them on TVTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BaitAndSwitchComparison

As with other deep southern states, geographic income variation is not the right way to measure economic inequality/inequality of opportunity- the racial income gap is.

I know you're trying to steelman (and I've upvoted accordingly) but the floor ain't working. Places like Chicago and Baltimore are graduating huge numbers of illiterate and innumerate kids. I wouldn't be surprised if black reading levels are actually worse today in Chicago than in 1950s Alabama.

And of course Chicago spends like 24k per year per student, among the most of any city.

Unfortunately, educating students isn't as simple as spending money. In fact, there's little correlation between money spent and results. Cutting budgets probably wouldn't effect student outcomes at all. Certainly, raising budgets hasn't increased standards.

It’s an interesting question. This suggests a 6.2% illiteracy rate in Alabama in 1950. Even assuming that was completely segregated, which was certainly not true, that would get us 132 out of 979 thousand, or 13.5%.

Meanwhile, searching Chicago gets breathless results about 25% “functional” illiteracy…and 20% for the whole state! That’s ridiculous unless the standard of illiteracy in 1950 was much lower. But exceeding Alabama’s 6% or even 13% seems completely plausible.

As for the floor—it’s not actually the cities I was thinking of. It’s the small rural districts across the South and Midwest. I think taking the federal funding from, say, Mississippi shutters a lot of schools. I’m not sure if the budgets back this up, though. If cutting all of the DoEd only cuts marginal state budgets by 10 or 20%, it might be worth it.

It’s an interesting question. This suggests a 6.2% illiteracy rate in Alabama in 1950. Even assuming that was completely segregated, which was certainly not true, that would get us 132 out of 979 thousand, or 13.5%.

Meanwhile, searching Chicago gets breathless results about 25% “functional” illiteracy…and 20% for the whole state! That’s ridiculous unless the standard of illiteracy in 1950 was much lower. But exceeding Alabama’s 6% or even 13% seems completely plausible.

It's entirely possible that Chicago is just uniquely bad, as well.

A major challenge for comparing literacy (or illiteracy) rates across time or different countries is that the measurements are very different. In US, "functionally illiterate" means you can cipher and sound it out, but if it's a sufficiently complex sentence you can't understand it. (For example, some instructions on tax forms.) In developing countries, "illiterate" means you cannot cipher the alphabet (or kanji, as the case may be).

A while back, a student in my Liberal Arts Math class did a deep dive comparing the literacy statistics for US vs. Bangladesh, because some statistics she found suggested that US was doing worse. Turned out that the US stats were for "functional illiteracy" while the study in Bangladesh asked its participants to sound out a few written words.

Not the same thing.

The way it is explained in the UK context is that "functional literacy" is the ability to read a story in a "quality" newspaper like The Times or The Guardian and understand it well enough to answer questions about what happened. That is a much higher standard than just being able to read.

Back in the day, literacy was assessed by self-report. The census taker would ask you "Can you read?" and write down the answer.

What if we literally just removed it?

Presumably there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the sudden loss of ~billions of dollars in grants, student loans, and subsidies handed out by the Department of Education to schools and individuals. Having said that, if the Department were phased out gradually and/or its money spigots moved into other arms of the federal government, I don’t think anyone would notice much difference. As it is, control over K-12 education is almost entirely at the state and local level in the US.

For what it’s worth, Canada has never had a federal Department of Education, but seems to have done just fine given its heritage and demographics.

...

I actually cannot. Most of the functions it could serve are best handled at the state level anyway.

The university 'systems' were functioning well for decades before DoE was even created.

There don't seem to be any collective action problems or market failures that it exists to solve.

Maybe it could be the department in charge of gathering and publishing various metrics on a national level, but that could be spun off to some other agency. Likewise I'd say it could be in charge of testing student aptitude, but the SAT existed for 50 years before DoE was created.

I'm at a loss. I despise agencies like the ATF and the FDA more than the DoE, but I can manage to justify the existence of those on some tangible grounds.

I don't know the answer to your question, but I did visit their website and I noticed that one of their menu options is labeled "Birth to Grade 12 Education", which strikes me as some creepy NWO-style language ("the education of a diverse global citizen begins at birth").

They use the same rhetoric where they want to educate homogenous nationalistic citizens, if that makes you feel better.

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